Scan have some refurbished Agility 4 256GB drives for around £90. All the reviews for these drives basically say they are ok, but due to their relatively slow speed compared to other SSD's they are not priced competitively enough. But for £90 they seem priced low enough to make it worth while? I would be using this to either replace a Vertex 2e, or possibly pop in my MacBook (if they play well) so being as fast would be perfectly ok as I basically just need more space/to replace a mechanical. Is it worth it?
Funny I have been pondering the same for a while now. I used a vertex 2e as my boot drive and I have a mechanical for my data disk. I was thinking of one of these agilities for a steam / programs drive, still gotta be faster than a mech drive and there would be nothing on there that I cant re-install if required to. Would be very interested to know what you decide. Nims
Whilst i wouldn't think of buying one (& wouldn't actively recommend any refurb drive d.t. the ltd warranty), they are certainly faster than the V2E. With the OP's idea of using it with a Mac, i guess the minor advantage is not having to use 'trim enabler' (it's not great with SandForce SSDs & shouldn't be used)... ...but that's hardly a major selling point, since it's neither got the largest install footprint nor is the most complex of programs. [Edit] What i'd written about SF was, in context, nonsense as i completely misread it as being an A3, not an A4... Whilst the SFs are better not using trim enabler - it's not a SF drive. Sorry for any confusion. [End Edit] & with nimbu's idea of still using the V2E for the OS then this wouldn't the best idea as the A4 is faster. For a decent new lower cost drive then sensibly it's looking at the Samsung 840 Evo @ £142.30 (which i think is overpriced by ~£7.30)... [okay, it uses TLC nand, but it's by far the fastest of the cheaper 240/250/256GB models] ...however, for a steam only drive, 'if' you can find a Crucial M4 for noticeably less (not the M500 as, below the 480GB model, it's a bit too shonky) then it'd be worth looking at. Overall though, in both cases it'd be better than what you've got, but i'd argue that the significantly better performance & the warranty being 3 times the length is worth the extra £50. it's your money though, of course.
Thanks for the advice, I was hoping you would reply My reasoning behind looking at it was simply the low cost for a relatively decent size. I am not going for all out speed, just the snappiess vs a mechanical drive. Is your main problem the lack of warranty period or do you really think the deal isn't worth it for the drive?
No problem at all. First off, i partially cocked up in the first post - as clearly noted - everything else was valid though. Right, looking at it one way, since it's the cheapest 240/250/256GB refurb drive from Scan then *if* money is that tight then, since it's naturally faster than a mechanical drive, it's your money & your call. Okay, there have been a few reports on here of Scan rejecting RMAs unfairly - & they banned me from shopping with them some years ago for insisting that they paid the return postage on a faulty mobo; as was their duty under the regs - but generally people seem to be happy with them. To answer your question, the problem i have is twofold - On one hand, there's the ltd warranty. This 'could' nominally be valued at ~£10 per year, based on the difference between a 4TB WD Red @ £149.98 (3 years) & a 4TB WD Green @ £140.28 (2 years). Whilst it may seem like an odd way to calculate it (tbh i've simply used those HDDs so that there's a figure vaguely based on something), i think it's a pretty reasonable minimum value for each year of warranty given the new cost of the SSD. Naturally, however, your cost to risk value may be different from mine - either perhaps lower (albeit that i'm not sure how it could be much lower - unless you know you're going to win the lottery in a year or something) or, if it would be very difficult for you to to fund a replacement if it failed on the 366th day, much higher. [NB i fully accept that the £10 a year is my 'rational thinking' about the risk... Of course i'd be really very annoyed with myself for making a false saving if i bought something under similar circumstances & it died just after a year... But that's only knowable in hindsight.] Anyway, using that valuation as a starting point, there's *at least* £20 in value that's instantly been taken off it. On the other, there's the comparative value of the drive itself. Well, whilst the current new price is ~£145, which would suggest a ~36% discount, £145 is a ridiculous amount considering that the Evo is cheaper. Okay, there's the advantage of (asynchronous) MLC vs TLC which increases longevity (albeit that both have a 3 year warranty when new) - but it's dreadfully slow in comparison. [NB the average data rates from Anand give the best overall comparison for an OS, etc drive (choose the heavy or light usage depending on your needs) - unless you've got some highly specific usage.] So, you're looking at a SSD that's really not worth its new price by a good %age... (since i see the Evo as being worth £135 - okay it's actually £7 odd more but you can probably get a little closer with cashback - then sensibly the A4 has to be worth far nearer to the £100 mark) ...& losing *at least* £20 of value from it with the warranty period & i honestly can't see where the comparative upside is. That said, as written at the beginning, *if* money is tight then, since it's naturally faster than a mechanical drive, it's your money & your call. Well, as i'm certainly not offering to make up the difference so that you can buy a new Evo, you've got to make your own value judgment on it - &, obviously, if you do decide to go for the A4, i hope it lasts for half of ever.
Thanks again for your post. I would rep you but I already have It isn't necessarily a money 'issue', just that I don't want to pay for all out performance when I only really need to upgrade my space whilst keeping the responsiveness of an SSD. In my work machine I have a Kingston v200 128gb on Ubuntu - not the most ideal setup and not a great SSD but the bootup time and responsiveness are easily enough for my needs, so this is something I was hoping from the Agility. But I think I will skip it for now, as you rightly pointed out the price isn't a million miles away from a new, much faster drive with 3 times the warranty so the value isn't quite a good as it first seemed. I am also doing a great job or spending money on keyboards, I need to buy a new suit for a wedding and my car insurance is coming out over the next 2-3 weeks so maybe best to wait a month I may even get a better deal on a decent price in a few weeks time...
Again, it's no problem at all. Well, if i were going to suggest a consumer drive for 'all out performance', it'd naturally be the 256GB 840 Pro - but it was about comparing more budget orientated drives. i then certainly wasn't aiming to suggest that you couldn't afford to spend more than the £92.30 - it's simply that everyone has a budget that they need to work within for stuff, & so there's no sense in making wild suggestions with someone else's money. Then, from my perspective, i've gone from a V Turbo - to 2x 120GB V Turbos in R0 - to 4x 50/60GB V2s in R0 (on a decent lsi raid card) - to 2x 256GB 830s in R0 - to 2x 256GB 840 Pros in R0 (currently using both of the Samsung arrays - one in each machine)... ...& each time i have noticed an improvement in both responsiveness & speed for my usages (separately using raid cards in both machines then i live with slower boot speeds anyway). Well, whilst i obviously accept that almost any half decent SSD will be faster than a HDD (unless you hammer the thing & it doesn't have a chance to recover), although there's an argument that goes that the speed increases aren't as pronounced as you increase cost, i believe it's also important to remember that the SSD is the slowest part of the system... ...so getting data into the memory (multiplied up if there's need for lots of swapfile usage) & vram is dependent on the speed of the slowest component, & all of the differences are cumulative - particularly when performing drive bound tasks. Still, it's always choice & that's the usefulness of a price differentiated marketplace... ...albeit that not everything's worth what's being asked for it. Anyway, i hope that, whenever you do decide to buy, you find a bargain - & obviously, along with sticking any questions on the forum generally if necessary, if you specifically want my input when you're buying then by all means send a quick PM so that i don't miss it.
Matt, I dunno if this helps you but I spotted the following on HUK and decided to get one. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-120...0149364&sr=8-1&keywords=120gb+ssd+samsung+evo Decided to grab it as a replacement boot drive, will wait for a bigger one for my steam / programs disk when its on offer. Regards, Nims
Thanks again, PD, your input is always welcomed and helpful. Especially when it comes to storage!! Nimbu, thanks for the heads up on that, I have been looking at 120gb drives instead of 240gb~ to do a similar thing to you. The price difference between 2 x 120gb and 1 x 240gb on some drives is very little and could work out better for me in terms of space management - or I could raid. I am still going to wait it out for 4-6 weeks though, so hopefully I can find some even better deals
Unless you have some specific use which is highly sequential, which is where R0 can particularly shine for some home users, tbh you'll be better off with a single 240/250/256GB SSD. Well, not forgetting that they tend to be slightly cheaper than two half-sized models, first off they have faster random r/w speeds - though, with faster models like the Samsungs, this is now more predominantly write speeds... ...& also semi-sequential (ie ~128KB) write speeds. &, secondly, without using ivybridge or haswell boards (or using a modded bios for sandybridge), you lose trim by putting them in R0 - & across the board by putting them in any other array type. Oh, & obviously there's a minor extra risk of losing data as there's 2 SSDs that could fail/have some issue rather than 1 - though in ~4 years of using various SSDs in R0, i've never had an issue on this level. Now, that's not to say that, if there's a real price advantage (or again if you've got a major usage that'll particularly benefit from sequential r/ws), you shouldn't consider a pair of 120/128GBs in R0, but... Just to note as i've mentioned using R0 myself, obviously, with my SSD R0 usage, i'm using pairs of modern 256GB SSDs - these independently generally being marginally quicker than a 512GB model anyway, so there's obviously a speed advantage (+ a price one)... ...whereas, with my historical usage, the 2x 120GB V Turbos used a smaller nand die capacity - making these the best models... [NB SSDs effectively work internally as a R00 array or, with the SFs, R50 - & there's been a fixed no of nand channels & nand die per channel to reach optimum performance for consumer controllers for years now.] ...however, whilst the 4x 50/60GB used the same nand die size as the Turbos, they were certainly slower than the 100/120GB models (half the no of nand dies of course), the big thing being that it was much cheaper, back in mid 2010, to buy these smaller drives... ...plus i already owned a decent raid card so could exceed the ~2.3-2.4x sequential (~480MB/s) speed limitation that was inherent with the 3Gb/s intel controller. [NB as mentioned back when it was released, the nand die size is part of the reason why the 240GB M500 is so shonky in compared to the competition - the die size having been doubled again, which means that you need to have to have twice as much nand to have the same no of nand die within the (effective) R00 array... ...hence why it's the 480GB M500 where you reach optimum speeds.]
Well I bought the 128 GB Evo for a boot drive, still waiting for delivery.... and then this goes and pops up this weekend for a data drive, am finding it really hard to resist! http://www.scan.co.uk/products/512g...write-410mb-s-1gb-cache-85k-i?ProductId=82363 512GB Refurb Agility 4, for £155, that cant be bad can it?
Scan's showing it as being £162.61 to me...??? i'll do sums using that figure therefore, not the £155. Anyway, as the A4's an EOL product then i'm going to have to make two assumptions here... 1. as i can't immediately see any useful reviews for the 512GB model, it will perform very slightly behind the 256GB one - this is based both upon comparing the V4s (where there is data) & that this is how almost every other SSD performs. (the big exception being the M500 d.t. it using a larger nand die size than any of the other SSDs - though occasionally other larger model will be slightly quicker... it's generally pretty marginal either which way) 2. & as it's not for sale new, its retail price would be ~£240. Now, since the retail for the 256GB model is £145, but its actual comparative value is nearer to £100, let's say £110 for the sake of a figure, this takes the comparative value of the 512GB down to something like £182. Very coincidentally, as i pulled the £110 value from the top of my head before doing the sums, this gives the same ~£20 difference that was there with the 256GB model - & is what i was arguing was the absolute minimum value that should be given to losing the 2 years of warranty for those. [NB just to note, the £150 price for the 4TB WD Red has gone - cheapest currently is £153.33, whilst the 4TB Green's down to £136.18 - so it 'could' be argued that each year of warranty is currently worth £17.15 - not ~£10 as before.] Okay, whilst this new deal 'could' be looked at on the basis that, rather than losing 4 years of warranty by buying 2x 256GB, you're only losing 2 years - & thus the deal would be ~£20 better - there's two things that need noting - 1. Firstly, the value assigned to the warranty needs to be increased as the retail price increases - so, working from the original £20, the 2 years of warranty of the 512GB model are worth a minimum of ~£33 - taking the saving down to £7. 2. &, secondly, if you stuck 2x 256GB drives in R0, they'd be significantly faster than a single 512GB (again excluding the M500) for anything that was sequential... & an even better option if you've got trim in R0 via a newer intel controller. So, the actual cash saved is very minimal once reasonable adjustments are made to the comparative value & the warranty relative to retail value, & it's a slower option. Again though, it's about money & choices - whilst the deal's simply not good enough for me to remotely recommend given the ltd warranty & the inherent risk, if you were lucky then it is a cheap price for a somewhat average performing 512GB SSD. As before however, it's up to the purchaser to make their own risk assessment - it's just how i would look at it all.
Hey PD, Here is how I have been thinking about it.. 1) Space required, currently my data disk takes up about 300GB 2) Raid isnt an option, ITX board with only 3 SATA connections 3) Noise and speed, obviously ssd is quieter than a mech drive, plus the board im using is limted to sata 2 so the drive should max out the available bandwidth. 4) Moving to a proper ITX case so drive must be 2.5" A WD black 2.5 500gb drive will set me back £50, but I cant see myself using this beyond this build. So the way I see it in my head, yes its a punt at £155, however 1) No critical files stored on here 2) Relatively cheap for a large SSD (again i understand why its cheap) 3) Fits my other constraints. Got until 3Pm to pull the trigger!
Sorry that i've missed the cut off time of 3pm... albeit by a couple of minutes... Typing as fast as i can. So you're suggesting that you'll have a 120GB Evo, either this A4 or a 500GB WD Black &... ...an optical drive??? Naturally, i was assuming that someone would buy a pair of matching 240/250/256GB drives... Okay, so you're looking at a programs/steam drive - so there's going to a clear advantage to using a SSD rather than a HDD. To then quickly note, whilst a 3Gb/s controller will naturally limit the more sequential speeds, esp smaller r/ws will be slower using an A4 than with a higher end drive. This, however, shouldn't be *that* relevant for games - but it would have more of an impact with programs... Certainly you'd want the OS & pagefile on the Evo using the setup i have assumed from combining what you've written in all the posts. i then can't see where the backup is in this build for any of the data - unless you're either not having one or using an external solution... The ability to have a backup HDD is the reason for mentioning the 500GB Evo below btw - with more sata ports or an external backup i'd stick with the 2x 250s. Obviously i appreciate that you're talking about having a total of 640GB of nand before OP & formatting & the like (the 120 physically has 128GB in), whereas i'm talking about 512GB of nand (the 500 physically having 512GB in)... ...but what i don't quite understand is why you bought the 120GB Evo - giving a total spend of ~£237 inc the 512GB A4... ...whereas it wouldn't have been *that* much more to just buy a 500GB Evo @ £264.38??? (the difference being a little less than the min that needs accounting for from the warranty) Or, for 2x 250GBs (256GB physically), they're currently £277.72 which, in R0 would obviously be faster again. (the difference being a little more than the min that needs accounting for from the warranty) Simply that, even 'if' all of the 300GB were to be vitally important (i don't quite get leaving all & everything installed - i just don't need all the games in the world installed at once/delete them once finished - & limit my installs of Adobe & whatnot to the elements that i actually use), adding on ~80GB from the boot drive you'd have enough space to both store everything & have a reasonable amount of extra OP... Okay, it's certainly not the generally recommended 25% min, as that'd only leave you with ~4GB of free space which would be unworkable, but, even keeping everything installed, you could sensibly be looking at 10-15% OP (working from the 512GB total nand naturally) & have a much faster solution overall. Anyway, giving my honest opinion, if i were you, i'd cancel the order for the 120GB Evo & rethink the whole thing. Still, as always, your money & your call - & if you go for the A4 then i wish you all the luck with it lasting for half of ever.
Hey PD, Ordered it.... I'm sure it will be fine and thanks for all your advice so far. I'll answer the backup one first as thats easy, currently running WHS on the network which backs up the machine every night so not too worried about that. The setup will be: 120 GB EVO: Boot OS disk, Fundemental apps 512 GB A4: Games / Data Optical The data disk has a combination of programs, games and virtual disks from various different playing that I do but I dont need at a push, but I would like to be fast ish. I did consider looking at the seagate hybrid drives, but decided to go for another SSD We're in a little state of flux with where we are staying so this PC is currently in the bedroom, so am also trying to cut down the amount of noise produced hence ssd over mechanical. Eventually the machine will be getting downgraded and run as a simple box my wife will use in the bedroom to surf the net and i'll be rebuilding a chunkier gaming only machine and a separate VM server so the A4 might get recycled, sold on or become a nice paper weight! (I might try get hold of one of those Zalman external HD caddys that lets you mount ISO images and whack it in there!) You are right I could have just purchased the 512GB EVO, but I felt better having OS and data split over two physical drives. (My WHS OS drive died a little while back, all my data was on separate disks so I didnt feel too bad having to reinstall.) I'm sure if it all goes wrong ill be posting in the techincal support forum at somepoint in the future, full license to tell me I told you so as many times as you like! Regards,
i'd never say 'i told you so' over it... Well, i wish all & everyone well with whatever choices they make - & i hope that you're happy with the drive & it lasts for at least as long as you need it for. [Edit] Oh, & if i'd known that you were also using VMs then i'd have noted that they naturally access data in a very similar way to an OS drive - so there's more of an advantage to faster small r/ws than with steam & whatnot... Just adding for clarity.
