Should I buy new SSDs?

[JKJK]

Edit: I''m writing this post in pain, after surgery, on drungs, passing the time, at night. Please excuse me if I don't make sense.
I'm also from Norway, so English is not my mother tongue, so please excuse my english.

Hi

To the case:
Love the site, completely new to the forum.
Again: HI!

I'm concidering changing (at least some of) my daily driver SSDs. I've been in the game since late 2008/early 2009. My first SSD vas a G.skill titan that got exchanged with X-25M two weeks later.

Since then I've been around The most of the intel series including everything from the x-25m/e to the M525 and others in that rank, and P910 and DCS 3500 (but not 7xx series). Some samsung, a lot of different Sandforce drives and a bit in between.

Between two jobs and private investigations, i've probably had, i don't know ... 50+ intels and whatnot all the others. During these years I've returned (not concidering the G.skill) 2x intel 510 and 2 or 3 320.

So....

Private Workstation:
Works mainly as: XBMC media center with big database.
Details: Supermicro C7P67. 16GB RAM. I7 3770K. Windows 8.1U1
Extra controller: IBM1015 with hacked firmware (might be exchanged with something else. Probably Areca 1880/1882/1883)... General HW update within a year.
Daily drivers: 2x Intel 520 (512 OS +256 Games ? don't remember)

Does once in a leap year: Video editing and virtualisation (vmware workstation).
Does once in a blue moon: gaming. For most 30 minutes at the time. Not much gaming, there....

Private laptop:
Works mainly as: Main private pc/workstation and very beloved . Most used after work hours and during second job.
Details: HP 8460p. 16GB ram. i7 2620M. Windows 8.1U1
Daily drivers: 2x Intel 520 250GB

Work Workstation
Daily work: Moderate (probably not over QD10) multitasking. Heavy video compression. Visualization (Vmware workstation).
Details: Supermicro X8DAI mainboard, 24GB RAM, 2x Xeaon notremember.
Extra controllers: Areca 1880 4GB cache.
Daily drivers: C: Intel 520 512GB. D: Intel 510 128GB. E: Vertex 3 120GB ...or something.

Macbook
(the white one ... old. 2010? Don't remember)
Works mainly as: LAB.
Daily driver: Samsung 840 PRO 256GB

Work laptop 1:
Daily work: Meetings.... needs quick response (QD1-5?). Failsafe.
Details: HP 2530p. 8GB ram.
Daily drivers Intel 520 120GB + 250GB

Work laptop 2:
Daily work: LAB. Was going to be Work laptop 1, but isn't quick or powerfull enough. Shit.
Details: HP Elitebook revolve 810(?) 8GB ram.
Daily driver: Intel 525? Don't remember.


So.
If any, what SSD's should I upgrade? I'm sniffing on the Intel 730 or DCS 3500, but is it really better for my workstations than the 520's or the 840pro/evo?

Laptops... ? Hold on to the 520s or go for Samsung 840 pro/evo? Others?

 

[ronbo613]

If your systems are doing what you want them to do, why spend any money to improve things that don't need improvement? If you just want to buy new stuff for fun, then go ahead.

When you get out of the hospital, buy a carbon fiber bicycle to help with your rehabilitation. Cycling is something that will take care of any excess cash you have. If you have any money left over, there's always beer.

Get well soon.

 

[JKJK]

Yes. That's absolutely why I wrote my first post on this forum. After 6k+ posts on hardware.no.

Thank you for the well wishes.

 

[JKJK]

If you have any other hardware upgrade recommendations, I appreciate those as well.
(but this is a storage forum?)


Really. If you consider this a joke, I'm sorry.
I thought the first post was detailed enough.
If not: What information do you need?

 

[Charlie98]

I don't really see a problem... seriously. Intel is rock solid.

The only drive I see in there that raises any sort of flag is the Vertex 3... some folks has some serious issues with them. I'd swap that out for an Intel 530 or 730 and rock on. I would NOT upgrade any of the Intels to Samsung... in fact, I feel the other way around... I'd take an Intel drive over Samsung every day and twice on Sunday.

 

[JKJK]

Well, yes. You have a point.
But.

The 840 pro -feels- faster.
Plextor, Sandisk and ADATA (good old) (and Curcial) has some serious competition.
...or?

Anyway I hear what you're saying.

What I'm most curious about is Intel 7300 (or DCS 3500/3700) for my workstations (vs. samsungs 840 seris).

My servers is mainly running 320s (Raid 1) for OS and 520s for data (EXi 5.0 - 5.5u1) (Raid 6 or 1+0). (forgot to remember that).

 

[ronbo613]

I like Intel and Samsung, in my personal experience I don't really have anything bad to say about either one.

If you are hell bent on replacing any of those drives, get rid of the Vertex, I've owned a couple OCZ SSD's, I wouldn't put one in my computer if you gave it to me for free.

You've got SSD's on top of SSD's, you look like you're in pretty good shape.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I've had Intel, Patriot, and now Mushkin SSDs. To be honest -- one of each.

In January, I started shopping around for a high-capacity 840 drive. As I recall, there was some sensation a few years back over the Samsung 830 drives, but I don't think you'll find any available in factory shrink-wrap today. Besides, performance was again increased in the 840 series.

There are two types of 840s, as far as I can tell: the EVO and the Pro. And I understand that the Pro's MLC was for some reasons better than the EVO's TLC design.

I had a bad experience with an Intel Elm Crest in 2011: it was either a buggy driver or mis-installation under Windows -- I can't say. We put it into an LGA-775 system as the boot drive with only SATA-II ports, and there are no complaints despite the controller performance limits.

 

[Charlie98]

Well, yes. You have a point.
But.

The 840 pro -feels- faster.
Plextor, Sandisk and ADATA (good old) (and Curcial) has some serious competition.

Yes, the 840Pro is faster than the Intel 520s, et al, but I don't see the performance increase vs cost tradeoff swapping what you have already. Sure there are faster SSDs than the Intel 520's... but would you really be able to see a tangible difference in daily use... probably not, and certainly not worth the cost of admission.

 

[yidao]

Agree with ronbo613.

 

[dclive]

I'm with the others -- why bother? But I would rip everything out and replace with a single ESXi server on the back end and a laptop and desktop on the front end ...

 

[AViking]

If you have money to blow then this seems like a huge waste of money.

If it was my money I would immediately replace the OCZ drive and buy some 4K monitors.

 

[Tristor]

The only system you have which sees a heavy enough workload and has a sporadic enough configuration currently to see a realized gain from replacing the drives is your work workstation. I would suggest (if you've got the ports available to do so) doing a RAID10 of 4x240 or 480GB(depending on capacity needs/wants) Sandisk Extreme IIs and migrating your Intels to one of your other systems as needed and getting rid of the Vertex 3 altogether.

http://anandtech.com/bench/product/375?vs=839 should give you an idea of what you might see as a performance gain. The other benefit is a more unified storage setup, since it would provide you ~500-1TB of fast, redundant storage on that system.

Everything else looks pretty good, I just don't think you'll see a significant real performance gain on most of the other systems.

 

[milee]

Given the amount of SSDs you're using I think your question makes sense. I'm in a similar situation myself (except my SSDs are all Intel).

It looks like you standardized on the 520 (which I also did back in 2012) which is a really great drive. What exactly is that you're concerned about?

1. Unexpected mass failure of the 520s?
2. Warranty loss/expiration?
3. Performance?
4. Reliability?
5. Power efficiency?
6. Some missing feature?

1. Can't predict the future, but I'm using 520s since Intel launched the series and haven't got one single failure of this model. I also never heard any horror story of it.

2. It's about 2 years old and you still got another 3 years to figure out your upgrades if warranty is your concern. Do you actively write a lot more than 20GB/day/drive? I don't think so.

3. Performance is good enough for workstation tasks, even for servers. It's easy to get the specs wrong giving you higher hopes for this drive (SF compression, low QD IOPS, steady consistency and write amplification, factoring in over provisioning, etc.). In my experience it's solid.

4. Again, these drives are pretty reliable (after 2 years). They don't have power failure protection, the UBER is an order of magnitude worse than the current data center models, the endurance (as stated by the manufacturer) is way lower than their big brothers. Until the DC S3500 launched last year, many ad-hoc data center configurations were including the Intel 520.

5. You're not into thousands of these to really worry about power efficiency for desktop machines. For laptops it's not that bad either, although your 840 PROs are more efficient. Even though I haven't used a single 530, they are advertised as much better than the 520s regarding power consumption, but the professional reviews say not by that much (in fact the active power consumption is a bit higher than the 520, but the idle one is lower.)

6. Do you have any feature in mind that you need from an SSD and it's not included with the 520? I know I do prefer the enterprise features and design of the DC models (S3700 and S3500). That's why I stopped buying the 520 when the S3500 launched. I use it everywhere I see fit and there are very few occasions where I need to put an S3700 instead.

I still have X25-Es around (one with almost 1PB of host writes!) I still use 40GB 320s for file server OS drives. I have lots of 520s. But the S3500 is just better and the S3700 even more so, but also 2x more expensive.

And here's my personal thought on the new 730 and I admire Intel for that:

The S3500 sold. The production costs got down. The 3rd gen controller is a hit. The enterprise moniker possibly stops many consumers from buying it. Why not create a new product, reuse the controller, tweak the firmware, cut the encryption, leave the power failure protection, overclock it a bit, swap the "enterprise" moniker for the "enthusiast" one, use NAND "leftovers", rate it at 60% of the equivalent S3500 models endurance and profit!