amazon has a 128gb samsung 830 up for £77 edit: when googling the liteon drives , its coming up as ebay pretty much for sales , which says to me , they are not sold in the EU market so are ` grey` imports = expect no warranty as they seem to be OEM drives. cant see anything wrong per se with the hardware itself , as said above they are owned by plextor which use toggle nanad on a marvell controller - BUT i wouldnt trust the warranty status
How many people have returned an SSD over 3 years? Not being facetious. AFAIK you can't RMA if the performance or capacity drops, only if it outright fails.
I believe he means the longer the warranty, the more faith the company has in its product. I tend to agree. FWIW, I'd go with a Samsung 830 or a Crucial M4 as well.
How many people have had a SSD for 3 years though? Well, you & i are probably 2 of the very few people on here who are anywhere near it... ...& we were also buying in at a time when our models either had or were about to have GC & trim added in via a f/w update - whereas many of the comparable ones didn't & so could become horrendously slow in short(ish) order... ...giving ours an advantage over some of the competition. Certainly, with my V Turbos have/will (one has & one needs to be when i get around to putting some V2s into this box) stuck into my folks' machines... Okay, even they aren't a patch on the latest models, but there's bunches of life left in the things... (not least as for ~2/3rds of both of their lives so far they had >50%+ OP, d.t. upgrading to 4x V2s as the main array, so...) ...they're doing my folks a good turn (they don't want to spend much money, but value anything that makes them faster for free... ...as we all would naturally), but now have almost no warranty. As to RMAing, certainly the official word from OCZ (well, via their forum) going back was that it's about the cycle usage if it's the nand that's at fault. So, if you hammer the things & exceed the rated cycle count within the warranty period then it's your own look out... (naturally write amplification will have an effect... ...on non-SFs this can easily reach ~5 times(*) what's written for an OS/apps use on a consumer SSD... very much lower if you're writing nothing but highly sequential data... ...& up to ~12x max if you've got some odd use that requires huge amounts of very small & highly random r-e-ws... ...whereas on SFs this typically around ~0.6x (ie lower than what's sent to be written) for an OS/apps use... & up to ~2.6x with a huge no of very small & highly random r-e-ws... [NB *this was based upon rough calculations given the details that Crucial released about the M4's lifetime writes & the nand spec... all other figures coming from Anand.] That's without increasing the OP of course, which will improve both the non-sequential situations.)...but if you don't & there's an issue with the nand then you've got the same warranty as if the controller or ram or anything else in there were to fail.
What about the huge progression of NAND and flash storage though (ignoring the wear drop per production node decrease because memristors are coming)? I know we're limited by SATA 6 interface now but 3 year ago we were <200MB/s. In 3 years again we'll have SATA12G and/or more PCIe options. Won't this prompt the tick of an upgrade? It's still the slowest part of a PC and most significant upgrade. It's not like storage drives where speed doesn't necessarily matter - I've kept my Samsung F1s from 2008.
Side note, we are not limited by SATA 3 at all. Unless you work exclusively with very large files all the time, you are not limited. When the performance of small files reach near or even remotely close to SATA max speed, then we will talk.
speed limitations related to controllers rather than the interface then? anyone using the new marvell kit yet?
But, conversely, unless you work with nothing but small files then... Well, it's (again) the reason why i rate the Anand's light & heavy b/ms as they clearly state what they're testing & cover a typical range of i/os for both a light & heavy multitasking usage. Now, of course we're only looking at a ~230MB/s average data rate from the best consumer SATA SSDs atm in a heavy multitasking environment, so there is some ways to go... ...but when you lose x amount of the sequential write speeds (as you do with the smaller SSDs or something like the M4) or with compressed data & (esp) the async nand SFs... ...this drags the whole average down. Well, a 256GB M4 is around 70MB/s slower & a 240GB A3 around 60MB/s slower than a top end 256GB SSD. Basically this is saying that things like sequential speeds are important in the 'overall user experience' - without needing to have a very specific data type usage. (though naturally they're not the only concern) Along with the above, you still have both intel & Crucial releasing 3Gb/s SSDs... ...the latter being days ago. Now for Crucial to get involved, they really must believe that there's a market for dirt cheap SSDs that (provisionally) appear to have worse than the best that were available in 2009... Well, even with bunches of stuff running, the V Turbo in this machine has faster sequential reads than all of the models & only the 256GB has faster writes... There's ltd info about the r.l. specs for the Crucial V4 though so it is *not* a proper comparison... Oh, & the 120GB V Turbo (from 2009) was >200MB/s for sequential reads... ...a quick check (with AS SSD & all manner of things running - rather than a clean 2ndary drive test) & it's getting >240MB/s reads & >170MB/s writes. Otherwise, i don't doubt that there will be even faster SSDs next year & the year after &... ...but, alongside what intel & Crucial are releasing, i imagine that many people on here will be repurposing their new(ish) SSDs, as i do, when they upgrade... ...well, there always has to be someone in a family &/or with friends who's tech support & whatnot for the rest.
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT128V4SSD2 press product details - quite low iops oO edit: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6125/crucial-v4-ssd Phison PS3105 controller edit 2: http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...sk=view&id=701&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=2 an indication of performance (Patriot Torqx 2 SSD using the same controller and toshiba MLC NAND)
Thanks for the additional links... i'd seen the Anand article (though it's a little lacking in detail) - but, based upon that & your last link, the Crucial V4 is slower than the Patriot - i imagine d.t. using imft rather than toggle nand. To give a *very* vague comparison as QD1 & QD64 4K r/ws are a bit meaningless for a normal desktop usage since the average QD will be higher & 4Ks are not the only small r/ws... ...my old V Turbo has ~ 2.5x the QD1 4K reads, marginally lower QD64 4K reads & about a third the 4K write speeds... ...it's also got less than a 3rd of the read access time... ...but pushing 4 times the write access time. (though, again, there's bunches of stuff running, rather than testing a lovely clean drive with nothing much in the background or anything running on it) So, as the Crucial V4 appears to be slower (based upon Crucial's own numbers), we're then looking at a new 2012 drive that is likely to have worse read speeds than a SSD that was out ~3 years ago, but faster small writes... Whilst there is some weighting toward writes within a r.l. light os/apps usage, this makes the 128GB Crucial V4 very likely to perform around the same overall... ...whilst with a heavier usage, there's a weighting toward reads, it would likely swing slightly toward the 3 year old 120GB V Turbo. Still, this is *only* on the basis of a ltd data set - & having to hypothesise on the basis of a different SSD with the same controller but alt nand & no idea about the f/w... ...not particularly about discussing the merits of buying that Crucial thing... Well, the whole point is that, on the basis there's the market for this thing now, it's why a decent old SSD still can still have a reasonable use in the here & now... ...& so why a new decent SSD now could easily still have a reasonable use in >3 years time.
I just heard about the new v4 series from Crucial today. My first thought was that the "v" would probably stand for "value". Can't say I have any hopes for this series. Actually, I'm more afraid it'll tarnish the good reputation of the m4 series since some people are bound to mistake one for the other. "They said get a Crucial. Something with a 4 in it."
with the specs crucial quote it is as you say: slower. patrit drive is listed at 270/230 , whereas the crucial drive is 230/175; they need to drop the price to make it attractive , as currently the samsung 830 can be bought for the same as the 128 V4
Yeah, the M4 *was* a decent budget choice... ...but their pricing has either gone awry somewhere in the UK or they simply can't compete with Samsung. Well, as 256GB is the ideal size to buy generally for speed vs cost, it looks as though there's £5 between the cheapest 256GB Crucial V4 & the 830... ...& even the M4 looks to be more expensive atm - somewhere between the 830 (@ £145) & the OCZ V4 (@ £170), despite being slower than both irl.
