whats the most reliable SSD right now?

[Eug]

So for a C2D MacBook Pro, you'd recommend Kingston, Crucial, and Intel, and maybe Samsung?

I'll stay clear of Sandforce-based units. It's not my primary machine, but still, any crash would be a major PITA.

Minerva in the Apple forum is having terrible issues with the Crucial M4.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?p=32144085#post32144085

If you search for Macbook Pro early 2011 Crucial M4 you will see this computer (particularly the 17" model like mine) just does not work with 6Gbps SATA drives, period! The ones that do actually work are lucky apparently.

It seems to be a signal issue between the motherboard controller and the drive itself.

Initially I tried cloning with disk dupe and it failed. CC copy worked however the computer was horribly slow booting (about 20 minutes to logon screen!) and freezing constantly.

Tried loading snow leopard off boot disk and it hangs and eventually ends with the dreaded install failed screen!

 

[IcePickFreak]

It appears all of the mentioned Samsung SSD's are Sata II drives while the Crucial M4's (at the same Newegg price) are rated SATA III. Will there be a performance difference here?

Lots of positive reviews on the Crucials. How do they compare to the Samsungs on performance and reliability?

I'm still running a Q9450 on a DFI LT P35-TR2 with no plans to update for awhile yet so the SATA II only on the Samsung 470 Series wasn't an issue for me. If your board supports SATA III though I would definitely go for a SATA III ssd as there is a bit of a performance difference.

Also, yup currently Samsung only has SATA II ssd's, but there was just an article on AnAnd frontpage on the upcoming Samsung 830 6Gbps ssd. It says they're due out in October.

 

[KingFatty]

I'm seeing recent price drops on SATA III SSD drives (e.g., the Vertex MAX IOPS for $240 on newegg). Is it coincidence, or could everyone be trying to move inventory on SATA III drives before Samsung's new drives come out? Could Samsung's new SATA III SSDs actually move ahead of Sandforce/OCZ for top performance? Perhaps price drops have nothing to do with Samsung's recent announcement, but rather are only to do with the recent scare over Sandforce?

 

[Eug]

Well, given the recent Sandforce scare, and because my 2009 13" MacBook Pro is only SATA 2 anyway, I ended up going with a much slower SATA 2 Kingston SSDNow V100 over the much faster SATA 3 OCZ Solid 3, even though the latter wasn't all that much more expensive.

P.S. This Core 2 Duo laptop now flies. It feels faster in general OS usage than my even my Core i7 iMac (which has a 7200 rpm hard drive).

 

[onethreehill]

I'm seeing recent price drops on SATA III SSD drives (e.g., the Vertex MAX IOPS for $240 on newegg). Is it coincidence, or could everyone be trying to move inventory on SATA III drives before Samsung's new drives come out? Could Samsung's new SATA III SSDs actually move ahead of Sandforce/OCZ for top performance? Perhaps price drops have nothing to do with Samsung's recent announcement, but rather are only to do with the recent scare over Sandforce?

Last week it was $265 on newegg
Prices of SSD go up and down, nothing to do with Sandforce recent problems IMO

 

[Athadeus]

Well, given the recent Sandforce scare, and because my 2009 13" MacBook Pro is only SATA 2 anyway, I ended up going with a much slower SATA 2 Kingston SSDNow V100 over the much faster SATA 3 OCZ Solid 3, even though the latter wasn't all that much more expensive.

P.S. This Core 2 Duo laptop now flies. It feels faster in general OS usage than my even my Core i7 iMac (which has a 7200 rpm hard drive).

Kingston SSDNow V+ 100s seem quite reliable. I have been installing a bunch in laptops at work, and none have had any problem yet. About 15x 96GB, 3x 128GB, 2x 256GB, and 4x 512GB. I am not sure how upgrading older laptops with $1000 SSDs is supposed to save the company money, but they have enough to do what they want.

I have only bought 1 SSD so far for my 3 computers, a G.Skill Phoenix Pro 120GB using SF-1222. It seems quite fast, and the desktop I have it in feels like the fastest computer I have ever used. No problems with it in 9 months of medium use. I am considering taking a chance with a 120GB Corsair Force GT, or even 2x 60GB ones in raid 0 :sneaky:.

 

[dryfly]

Being new to the world of SSD's (in fact I don't even own one yet) I am intrigued by all of the comments on different brands. It seems as if all of the users are beta testers.

Even thought his technology is new, there are zillions of brands to choose from and yet there doesn't seem to be any one brand, size or type that seems to stick out as problem free.

I really haven't even got to the benchmarks stage yet and I'm not sure if it might not be better just to use my old spinning HD for a while longer even though I want to jump into this technology for the fun of it.

 

[IcePickFreak]

Got my Samsung 470 128GB yesterday, unplugged my other drives, installed ssd, and had 0 issues installing Win7. Checked and looks like it's aligned, but I did have to manually disable indexing & defrag on the drive. Seems to be performing great so far, boot time is extremely quick etc, and of course my WEI score went up to 7.6 for system disk (was previously at 5.x with my old hdd.)

Will get some benchmarks up later (I know it's not going to be the fastest ssd out there,) but am very happy with my purchase so far.

 

[Eug]

After the MacBook Pro SSD upgrade, using my Windows 7 laptop now makes me want to rip my hair out.

Now I'm thinking of getting an SSD for that too. However, it's one of those Acers with a hidden recovery partition. How would I best clone that drive (recovery partition and boot partition) to an SSD, and maintain my Windows 7 licence? Note that I do not have any Windows cloning software right now, so I'd have to get that too.

 

[Athadeus]

Get one with cloning software (I know the Kingston V+ 100s come with Acronis), or burn recovery DVDs, and use them to reinstall the recovery partition and Windows on the SSD.

 

[Eug]

Thanks. That's a consideration.

--

BTW, would enabling TRIM reduce the amount of garbage collection done by a drive like the V+100?

 

[IcePickFreak]

Did a AS SSD Benchmark on the Samsung 470 128GB this weekend. Of course I didn't realize there was a screenshot button on it til afterwards , but here's what it came up with (I just exported as an xml at the time.)


<ASSSDBenchmark XmlFormatVersion="1">
<Information>
<Name>SAMSUNG 470 Series SSD ATA Device</Name><Firmware>AXM09B1Q</Firmware>
<Controller>msahci</Controller>
<Size>119.24 GB</Size>
<DateTime>8/20/2011 06:35:22 PM</DateTime>
<BenchmarkVersion>1.6.4237.30508</BenchmarkVersion>
<Mode>MB/s</Mode>
<Note/>
<Signature/>
</Information>
<SeqTest>
<Read>250.38 MB/s</Read>
<Write>213.65 MB/s</Write>
</SeqTest>
<Random4K1TTest>
<Read>17.38 MB/s</Read>
<Write>58.73 MB/s</Write>
</Random4K1TTest>
<Random4K64TTest>
<Read>98.64 MB/s</Read>
<Write>55.71 MB/s</Write>
</Random4K64TTest>
<AccTimeTest>
<Read>0.107 ms</Read>
<Write>0.057 ms</Write>
</AccTimeTest><Score>
<Read>141</Read>
<Write>136</Write>
<Total>354</Total>
</Score>
</ASSSDBenchmark>

 

[SpacemanSpiffVT]

that looks pretty low
is it in ahci mode?

for reference my crucial m4 total score was about 570

 

[mrSHEiK124]

To anyone buying a Kingston drive for a MacBook Pro (you really shouldn't be considering any other - Apple uses a Toshiba SSD, the V100+ is a Toshiba based SSD, read Anand's review) - you want the V100+. The regular V100 is a turd.

 

[Eug]

To anyone buying a Kingston drive for a MacBook Pro (you really shouldn't be considering any other - Apple uses a Toshiba SSD, the V100+ is a Toshiba based SSD, read Anand's review) - you want the V100+. The regular V100 is a turd.

Well, tried a (previous generation) 128 GB V-Series, a 64 GB V100, and a 128 GB V+100, all in my MacBook Pro.

All three worked fine in the MacBook Pro, with no compatibility or speed issues, and I was able to enable TRIM with all three. In fact, in some benches, the fastest of the bunch was the V100, not the V+100.

However, I returned the V100 and V-Series. Although they worked fine, both used a lot of battery power. I was a little surprised at the power usage of the V-Series, given Anand's review:

However, it turns out the 30 GB version of the V-Series is a special one, specifically optimized for low power use as a boot drive. In contrast, the 64 GB and 128 GB versions (the latter of which is the one I tried) are total power hogs. That was not obvious from the Kingston website, until you go to the right page. Their other page (which unfortunately was the one I checked when I bought it) doesn't separate the power specs for the various models. Too bad since a 128 GB model with the power characteristics of the 30 GB model would be totally awesome.

So, in the end, as you suggest, I stuck with the V+100. I didn't do formal battery life tests, but it does seem decent with that one. FWIW, this review compares the 96 GB V+100 against a 7200 rpm 200 GB Seagate Momentus drive. With the V+100 their laptop gets 158 minutes of battery life, vs. 137 with the Seagate, a difference of 15&#37;. Their 200 GB Momentus 7200.2 is 0.8 Watts idle and 2.3 Watts active. That suggests to me that at least for some usage, the V+100 probably isn't that much different in terms of battery power compared to a regular laptop 5400 rpm drive, despite the V+100's much lower idle power. The V+100's much higher active power removes any advantage the low idle power provides.

BTW, when you install the V+100, TRIM doesn't get enabled in OS X automatically. I had to use TRIM enabler to activate TRIM. (I figured that since this is likely similar or the same drive as Apple's own, and Apple activates TRIM on their own drive, then I'd be better off keeping TRIM on this drive too despite its aggressive garbage collection.) I suspect it's because Apple has a custom firmware for their SSDs. This is in contrast to some of their optical drives. Apple has custom firmwares for those too, but if you stick in an optical drive of the same model with a non-Apple firmware, the drive would often get recognized as a native Apple drive anyway.

 

[IcePickFreak]

that looks pretty low
is it in ahci mode?

for reference my crucial m4 total score was about 570

Yup AHCI mode is on. Keep in mind these are SATA II drives, and I am on an older P35 mobo so there may be a bit left of the table with older AHCI drivers I dunno. Huge difference over the old hdd that was in there though.

 

[phillyman36]

What about the Intel 520 ssd?