They are stated as being the best thing since sliced bread. But everyone has a view on different things, whether is hearsay or factual is totally irrelevant at this point. What i want to know is this; I use a computer for the usual stuff. Watching YouTube videos, work (web design/development), gaming and browsing. Why would one controller be better than the next apart from speed. i.e.. Indilix (sp) or Sand-Force?? And Why are they so expensive when they apparently degrade so fast? Why do they degrade? How long do they last? What's the difference between controllers to the lifespan of the product? All this confuses me. Tbh, I'm probably just going to get a F60 SSD and see for myself. Another thing that comes to mind is if the lifespan of the product is prone to being short, why would manufacturers think this is a viable product? Rant over, questions asked.
Think this kind of covers most of it... Different controllers have different ways of doing things as they're made by companies who are competing against each other... - The later indilinx firmwares have the advantage of both decent trim support & the most agressive garbage collection for non-trim environments - though are generally slightly slower than the others (specific model depending). - The current SFs use real time write compression to increase nand lifespan (which slows writing compressed files), don't particularly respond to trim, but have decent garbage collection (so are suited for non-trim environments) & are quicker than the indilinxes for reads & (forgetting the expensive pcie & hsdl ones which are much faster for both reads & writes), on average, the 64 & 128GB C300s for writes. Putting them in raid gives vastly better performance for the money than most C300 solutions since they run to speed on a 3Gb/s SATA connection & there aren't any decent & cheap 6Gb/s raid solutions (yet). - The C300 has the fastest read speed for a single SSD, but the 64 has slower writes than the others/the 128 slower on average than the SFs, is more reliant on trim since their garbage collection is shonky (so not as suited for non-trim environments), & needs a 6Gb/s controller or card - which can be hit'n'miss as to their real life specs on the onboard or budget end. Degedation occurs when either trim or idle GC can't keep up with the cleaning dirty nand blocks. Hence it depends upon (a) the SSD controller, (b) the amount of free space (the reason why over provisioning is so important), (c) the usage you put it to (ie amount & type of data that's written), (d) the amount of idle time, (e) whether you're using a trim enabled OS/setup, etc, etc... So, you take into account all of these things & make a decision based on that... Having said that, nand cells only have a limited number of read-erase-write cycles that can be carried out, so they are more/less appropriate for some types of usage than others - unless you're prepared to replace them more often or shell out on the more expensive SLC (rather than consumer MLC) SSDs. Whilst manufacturers give a (normally) 3 year warranty on consumer grade SSDs, this is on the basis of a specific r-w-e cycle - the controller keeps track of this & so, if it becomes read only d.t. running out of total cycles, you can invalidate your warranty. it kind of all comes down to making sure you know what you are buying is suitable for the task you're going to want to put it to - &, as such, is no different from buying anything else... ...so, for certain usages they are the best thing since there was something that's now the 2nd best, but for others they're not.
You'll only see a difference in how fast things load up mostly. I mean boot up, game loads etc. Nice thing to have, and I'm sure I'd miss mine if I didn't have it, but yeah. Not as substantial as a graphics card upgrade tbh or going from a laptop hdd to a samsung f3 say (just for example).