Most reliable SSD (50GB to 64GB)?

GMcDonnell

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 13, 2009
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EDIT: Was just told that they've changed the design to use an mSATA drive. Thanks for the feedback so far and apologies for the moving target...

I'm looking for the most reliable SATA SSD in the 50GB to 64GB range. Don't care about speed, not overly concerned about price, just reliability. I'm focused on getting a drive that will have the least chance of random failure - the amount of data to be written per day is not that much, probably 120GB or less in four sessions on a given day.

I'm told the drive will be replaceable in advance of predicted failure so again I'm focusing on getting a drive that has the lowest chance of just crapping out due to factors other than the life of the memory cells.

Use will be approximately 80% write / 20% read.

This is for a custom built / proprietary data acquisition tool. When powered off it will be subject to some vibration but will be well packaged / mounted. During use it will be in a pretty normal environment, more or less like what a laptop sees with temps inside the box up to 90F.
 
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What exactly are you doing on said drive that you're trying to get away with that tiny a drive?
 
What exactly are you doing on said drive that you're trying to get away with that tiny a drive?

It's a data acquisition system. Each run will gather up to 30GB data; at the end of the data acquisition cycle that data will be uploaded to a larger system. That's really all I can say about it.
 
You should probably look at the 100GB Intel DC S3700. They don't make them any smaller than 100GB. $250ish on Amazon, full power-loss prevention, rated for 1.825 petabytes of writes.
 
That drive (the Intel DC S3700) was on my short list just based on it being a server class drive.

Unfortunately they've just changed the requirement to be an mSATA drive and neither the Intel nor any of the other drives I was considering come in that form factor. So I'm more or less back to Square 1.
 
Then I might look at the Intel 530 series, which comes in SATA, mSATA and m.2. The mSATA versions come in sizes between 80GB and 240GB and are rated for 20GB per day for 5 years. I see the 80GB version on amazon for as low as $135.

The 530 is from their consumer line, so 20GB per day every day for 5 years might not be that great if you're looking for 120GB per day every day (that would reduce warranty use to a bit less than a year) but I'm not sure anyone else in the mSATA market has better.

There's Plextor's M6M line of mSATA drives, but warranty is simply listed as "3 years Plextor's Warranty Service"; Plextor's SSD Warranty page isn't very illuminating about how much writing you are allowed to do in the 3 years, so I suppose you may want to try chatting to their tech support on a weekday.
 
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