EDIT: reusing the same thread, anyone able to share a few tidbits based on experience of Crucial's RMA process? So I've had my fill of failed crucial SSDs, this time a 240GB MX500 that's 6 months old. My requirements are thus in order of priority... - Not crucial - Reliable - Reliable - Reliable - Amazon Prime-able for tomorrow - Minimum of 240GB - Moderately quick (as moderately quick as an MX500, so nothing special required) There's not a huge amount of value in going above 240GB for size, really, only if the cost makes a compelling argument to do so would I consider it. I've always been fond of Intel SSDs and always had good results, and they seem to get a fair amount of praise for reliability, though I'm conscious components are still shared amongst many of the consumer oriented drives. I've got an Intel 730 240GB in my basket at the moment, but the tomorrow delivery window doesn't close until 19:00, so have some time to take some other suggestions. Edit: I feel like the S3500 and S3700 would be a step too far, or is it. Thoughts?
Is it? I briefly looked at it, but noted it used the same controller as the 840 EVO, which is a distinctly consumer drive. Granted it has a vastly increase write endurance, but that's not entirely relevant for home use. It's a quick drive, but speed is firmly at the bottom of the list of priorities. Conversely the Intel 730 borrows its controller from the S3500, which is firmly a DC drive. If the Samsung controller is that reliable (can't find a lot of real evidence to suggest either way, just lots and lots of Sansung SSD fanboys saying they're the best *sigh*), shall I just save £70 and pick up an 840EVO? Food for thought anyway - nigh on the same price as the 730 and prime-able.
The problem with the 730 is that the 240GB is slower than the 480GB version and I don't like those speed disadvantages on lower capacity versions. Look at the read speeds here and everything is fine... then scroll down to the write speed and whoops, its the slowest one of the lot. Of course it will still feel about a million times faster than a mechanical drive, but essentially Intel wants you to spring for the 480GB version (which does not share those write speed limitations). I've never seen anyone attempting to test controller reliability, the only thing ever tested in terms of reliability is the nand. But as you said yourself, speed isn't your priority, so might as well go for the Intel.
I'm not sure it's because Intel is trying to push users to plump for the larger drives, smaller SSDs returning lesser performance is a well known design aspect on many drives - it's just the way it is. I appreciate the input, don't get me wrong, but I feel like a probably need to reiterate the list of priorities here (or perhaps I don't, sneaky edit ) - performance is firmly at the bottom. At the end of the day the system in question previously used a 256GB M500, no speed demon itself, and at no point did I ever feel IO performance was lacking. It's duties include Lightroom (local catalogue and library), a few proprietary application for work (nothing majorly IO intensive though) and a couple dozen chrome tabs at any one time. Hardly groundbreaking stuff really. If you're saying that the 850 pro is up there with the best of them on reliability, I wouldn't mind checking out a few sources for starters, but then I may as well get an 840 Evo since the same controller is in use. Amongst the tabs I recently had open (which was becoming unmanageable and it's now gone, as I'm on an 11.6" screen with the 27" being out of commission because of this kerfuffle), there was an article that tested SSDs by aggressively power cycling them during heavy writes - the Intel ones are the only ones that didn't miss a step. My other reason for having the 730 as the first choice is simply because the controller is derived from the S3500, and I've yet to hear anything negative about the reliability of that (and with the nature of my work, I would certainly hear something about any DC oriented disk if there was anything to hear). A little bit intangible, but still gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I'd be more than happy to spend half as much on an SSD if the 840 EVO is just as reliable as the 850 Pro and the 850 Pro is reliable enough against the 730 for it to not make any difference.
I've just fitted a Plextor M6e M.2 PCI-E 256GB Solid State Hard Drive - With PCI-E Adapter Card to my gaming rig his week, its very quick 770 MB/S read and 580 MB/S write, and it comes with a five year warranty. I'm well pleased with it.
Ah, I hadn't actually spotted that, does change things a bit and adds back some of the warm and fuzzies. Just uncovered another article citing a number of sources... http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/30/are-ssds-reliable/ Perhaps I save a few quid and go for the 840 EVO. Or perhaps I spend the same a double the capacity with the 500GB 840 EVO. Or perhaps I conduct a series of coin flips at 17:00 if I'm not any closer to decisively picking one to select from the three/four...
There is some reliability testing here for the 840 Evo and Pro, can't really find anything for the 850Pro other than theoretical explanations why it should be superior to older Samsung drives, but the Evo def did worse than the Pro (the evo gave up after 900TB) while the 840 Pro is still going after exceeding the write limit in spec tenfold. Searched high and low for anything comparable being done with a 730, but no luck, however I can't find any horror stories about it either.
I've given up completely with SSD's until I'm convinced that a truly bulletproof drive is worth buying, I've had three OCZ SSD's die (all replaced under warranty) none of them lasted more than two months so now gone back to a HDD and apart from the obviously longer boot time and the need to defrag I don't miss a SSD at all, on the plus side it has taught me the value of regular drive image backups and Acronis and an Icy Box docking/clone station are now my best friends
As you mention it, this latest failure leaves me at an appreciably higher failure rate with SSD than HDD. If memory serves me right, I'm at 3 for perhaps 15 - not a good track record really. I've only ever had 3 spinning disks fail, and that's out of at least 70 or so, possibly more like 100. Most of the reliability reports go on about drive endurance, which seems a bit moot these days for general use and it was only early/small drives where it was even of the slightest concern. All of the SSD's I've had fail have been sudden-death syndrome, and I wouldn't be surprised if every SSD I currently used is still at 95%+ life, endurance wise. I don't think there's any way I can ever go back to spinning disk for anything other than bulk storage though. I've bought two laptops recently with SSHDs in them with a view to selecting my own SSD rather than using the OEM one, and just the initial checking that everything was in check on arrival was frustrating (swapped them both our for 840EVOs thankfully, and not Crucial). At the end of the day the "important" data on the laptops and desktop is all real-time replicated to the server, and everything else is picked up in a weekly system image so I've not lost any data. The PITA of it is that I use both the desktop and one of the laptops for work, and my wife uses the other for work, so having a day of downtime because of failures like this just doesn't fly. With a failure on the laptop in a scenario where I'm working away for a few days and don't have the backups ticking over, I'd be royally goosed, so I'm "glad" it was only on the desktop when I'm WFH as at least I have the laptop to fall back on. But generally, downtime sucks :/
I've had the exact opposite experience, mechanical drives generally die on me within the first year, which is why I now buy nothing other than datacenter drives. Meanwhile every ssd I ever owned still works fine (except for some necessary performance maintenance on ssds that pre date the invention of trim).
As Mister_Tad says, I guess the problem with SSD reliability is that failure tends to be sudden and totally catastrophic, whereas with mechanical drives you tend to get a bit of warning as they typically start playing up for a bit and then fail catastrophically I guess the problem is that there isn't a huge amount of realworld reliability data out there - synthetic stress tests are well and good but I'm not sure that they are hugely helpful. That said, there are certainly some brands of SSD that I wouldn't touch with a bargepole (OCZ, I'm looking at you!).
I might have a different advert Just put in the order for the 730 - very nearly went for the 850 after reading some reviews, but the power-loss protection and a seemingly more robust end-to-end data consistency pipeline won me over to the 730. The skull is one black mark (quite literally) on the 730 in the Samsung's favour though, what were they thinking?
I have adblock so no. Also anther vote for the 850 pro, I have an 840 pro as my OS drive and its been faultless so far. I also have a larger 840 evo but only had it for a month.
Great drives, bought 10 of the 240GB to upgrade my team workstations... Manager signed off purchase, but later questioned what I had bought after he saw the skull, it's a distinctly odd thing for Intel to put on a drive.
I've got a pair of 320s that have been going forever, but then intel switched to sandforce drives for a bit, e.g. with the 330, 530 335 etc The 730, along with the S3500 and S3700 are intel controllers though.
My preferences (in order) are: Intel 530 Samsung Pro PNY Prevail Can't say I've ever had an SSD fail so I can't comment on warranty or recovery experiences from any of the above, but all three brands are currently in use in various machines of mine and have been working well with fairly extensive use. Though I do have my OS and important files backing up onto two WD Red 4TB drives in RAID0, so I'm obviously not 100% trusting that the SSDs won't ever fail.
