Advice on solid state drives?

**flyingcrocodile46** · 3rd February 2013, 14:22

I have been doing some research on the advantages of Solid state drives and am ready to take the plunge and upgrade the Sata II 500Gb HDD in my Acer Iconia 6120 Dual touch screen laptop which is running 8Gb ram and Windows 7 touch (don't like 8 and wont work properly with my dual screens).

I have spent quite a bit of time reading the Newegg feedback comments on the various brands and models of SSD. Based on the feedback around reliability and availability locally I have narrowed the choices down to (in order of preference) Samsung 840 Pro, Intel 520 series, Samsung 840 and Crucial M4.

I know that My sata II set up will not reap the bigger gains of the sata 3 drives but it looks like there aren't many sata 2 drives out there and they aren't much if any cheaper and some appear to have controller issues or limitations which may not be desirable. So I figured to run with the backward compatible sata III models (that don't have stability issues).

480 to 512 Gb are going to cost pretty much double the cost of the 240 - 256 GB drives and (up until recently) I made do with 60Gb of drive ok (in my previous laptop) so I probably can't justify spending more that the cost of the 240 - 256Gb drives.

From what I understand, some of the benefits of the samsung 840 pro over the std 840 are restricted to the 512Gb drive and with the Pro model at 25+% more $ than the standard it may not be the best value for money if I am only going with the 240 - 256Gb drive size. The Intel 520 is about 15+% more $ than the std Samsung 840 and I am not sure if it's worth it. The Crucial M4 is about the same price as the Intel 520 but maybe not quite as good performance and reliability wise.

That is where I am at.

Do any of you guys have any experiences and or knowledge that may be of benefit to me in this decision?

__________________

**flyingcrocodile46** · 3rd February 2013, 15:58

Putting my thoughts into words has helped make them clearer and am now looking to narrow it down to one of the samsung 840 models

A few more factors that I have noted are that the Intel 520 has 128byte auto data encryption built in (so no down time having to encrypt files which is a big plus if you are mega security concious (not so much for me). However it is 9mm thick (whereas both samsung 840 models are 7mm) so wouldn't be any good if I upgraded to an ultraslim form factor and wanted to reuse it (probably not likely) but it might result in a little more loss on re-sale value because of that, if I wanted to sell it separately to my current rig (into which I would re-install the original drive). Apparently the Samsung models feature a different memory manager than all other manufacturers and they read & write uncompressed files much quicker (which is probably the significant majority of typical data transfer that takes place).

The real kicker for me is that the Intel 520 uses almost 3 times more power that the two samsung 840 models. This is a lot more important for my purposes because my twin touch screens suck juice at a horrifying rate which together with an undersized 6 cell battery makes for miserable battery life of between 1 hr 20 to 2 hrs. I would like to improve on that.

So now it is just a matter of whether the sequential and random write speed gains of 280mps and 45k IOPs is worth the extra 25%, when my sata II setup probably won't benefit from it (but which would likely reduce resale loss down the track).

I am leaning toward saving myself the $100 now rather than later.

**bogan** · 3rd February 2013, 16:35

Haven't ever looked into laptop power/size features. But got a 240gig corsair one a few months ago, pretty damn happy with the speed of it; any spec SDD you get is going to make a huge difference to the practical speed. When you say 3x the power, is this doing work? idle? and is it in any way significant; not much point plugging a drip when there is a torrent coming out nearby...

**flyingcrocodile46** · 3rd February 2013, 17:08

Originally Posted by bogan

Haven't ever looked into laptop power/size features. But got a 240gig corsair one a few months ago, pretty damn happy with the speed of it; any spec SDD you get is going to make a huge difference to the practical speed. When you say 3x the power, is this doing work? idle? and is it in any way significant; not much point plugging a drip when there is a torrent coming out nearby...

Corsair have a good rep. I haven't seen any here.

The Intel 520 uses more power at idle that the Samsung 840 uses under load.

When you have little, little is worth more.

**bogan** · 3rd February 2013, 17:17

Originally Posted by flyingcrocodile46

Corsair have a good rep. I haven't seen any here.

Where are you looking, I found all manner of things they make available in NZ; they do a bloody good mouse fwiw.

**flyingcrocodile46** · 3rd February 2013, 19:03

Originally Posted by bogan

Where are you looking, I found all manner of things they make available in NZ; they do a bloody good mouse fwiw.

Found some on Priceme and Pricespy. A bit over 15% more that the Samsung 840 std with about the same spec. Power use about the same as the Intel 520. Cheers

**steve_t** · 3rd February 2013, 19:25

I'd be wary about the 840 with its TLC NAND but then again, your laptop will probably be obsolete before the chips shit themselves

**SMOKEU** · 3rd February 2013, 19:33

Personally I'd go for anything SF2200 based as the early issues with the transition to 22nm NAND have been sorted. They're all very similar in real world performance if the controller and type of memory is the same (asynchronous vs synchronous NAND), so buy whichever is cheapest and has the features you want. The Crucial M4 is a nice drive, but it is dated compared to the newer generation SATA3 stuff such as the Vertex 4. The more expensive drives tend to have more IOPS, but whether or not that noticeably affects real world performance for the applications you're going to run is questionable at best.

If you can afford it then buy a RevoDrive. http://www.oczenterprise.com/ssd-pro...te-drives.html
http://www.oczenterprise.com/ssd-pro...-c-series.html

Check out the specs on those OCZ drives. Up to 2.8GB/s read/write.

Read this http://www.overclockers.com/forums/s...d.php?t=726109
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/s...d.php?t=725788

**flyingcrocodile46** · 3rd February 2013, 20:40

Originally Posted by SMOKEU

Personally I'd go for anything SF2200 based as the early issues with the transition to 22nm NAND have been sorted. They're all very similar in real world performance if the controller and type of memory is the same (asynchronous vs synchronous NAND), so buy whichever is cheapest and has the features you want. The Crucial M4 is a nice drive, but it is dated compared to the newer generation SATA3 stuff such as the Vertex 4. The more expensive drives tend to have more IOPS, but whether or not that noticeably affects real world performance for the applications you're going to run is questionable at best.

If you can afford it then buy a RevoDrive. http://www.oczenterprise.com/ssd-pro...te-drives.html
http://www.oczenterprise.com/ssd-pro...-c-series.html

Check out the specs on those OCZ drives. Up to 2.8GB/s read/write.

Read this http://www.overclockers.com/forums/s...d.php?t=726109
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/s...d.php?t=725788

Thank you for taking the time to give me your thoughts

I have some reservations about OCZ gear. In reading reviews like those on Newegg. They seem to have a noticeable number of DOAs with early adopters and some have taken a few swap outs to fix (and some that don't appear to have been satisfactorily addressed). It all starts to get too hard when you have to check batch numbers to be confident you aren't buying a hassle.

I understand the reservations about TLC but from what I have read in various SSD technical reviews it seems that there is no suggestion of anything more to the concern than fear of the unknown.

Given my shitty battery life and SF track history V Samsung's, I am not too scared of the unknown to miss the opportunity to increase the battery life.

**SMOKEU** · 3rd February 2013, 20:59

Originally Posted by flyingcrocodile46

Thank you for taking the time to give me your thoughts

I have some reservations about OCZ gear. In reading reviews like those on Newegg. They seem to have a noticeable number of DOAs with early adopters and some have taken a few swap outs to fix (and some that don't appear to have been satisfactorily addressed). It all starts to get too hard when you have to check batch numbers to be confident you aren't buying a hassle.

Those issues were largely due to the early SF2200 controllers (which most SSDs use these days). Those problems have since been fixed so it's unlikely you'll get the same problems. The Crucial M4 uses a Marvell controller which is immune to the problems that the early SF based drives have (although that obviously does not guarantee that you'll never have an issue with it). Over the past year or so SSD technology has improved up to the point where reliability can be just as good as, or even greater than that of an ordinary consumer level HDD. http://www.overclockers.com/forums/s...d.php?t=683156

The guys at www.overclockers.com are very good at giving helpful advice on these sorts of things so have a look there if you want honest advice from people who really know a lot about these things.

**flyingcrocodile46** · 3rd February 2013, 21:01

Originally Posted by SMOKEU

Those issues were largely due to the early SF2200 controllers (which most SSDs use these days). Those problems have since been fixed so it's unlikely you'll get the same problems. The Crucial M4 uses a Marvell controller which is immune to the problems that the early SF based drives have (although that obviously does not guarantee that you'll never have an issue with it). Over the past year or so SSD technology has improved up to the point where reliability can be just as good as, or even greater than that of an ordinary consumer level HDD. http://www.overclockers.com/forums/s...d.php?t=683156

The guys at www.overclockers.com are very good at giving helpful advice on these sorts of things so have a look there if you want honest advice from people who really know a lot about these things.

Cheers

Will do

**steve_t** · 3rd February 2013, 21:16

This might also be interesting reading and is pretty recent

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...mark,3269.html

**Gremlin** · 4th February 2013, 00:08

Haven't used Samsung at all, used OCZ previously and now we're not touching it. Some of it related to the controller issues, some not, just didn't look like they could make a reliable drive (and we'll take reliability over outright performance).

The Intels have been the pick of the bunch in terms of being rock stable and simply doing their job, so we've ended up just staying with them. Avoid the 3 series, the 5's seem to be good. They do have a black plastic ring around the top that can be removed, but then the screws are too long. Done that a couple of times otherwise I couldn't get the drive into the laptop.

Ultra important to then tune the OS for the SSD (find the SSD optimisation guide). You don't have to do everything, but stuff like indexing and defragmentation are important otherwise it will turn the drive to sludge.