My SSD just broke

F

fullvietFX

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 1, 2004
Messages
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My Vertex 2 randomly stopped working. The BIOS randomly stops seeing drive. Time for a new drive, what's the best out right now? My budget would be under $500. No OCZ anymore either.
 
fullvietFX - Crucial uses Marvell controllers, but I do not know if they use them exclusively.
 
^^Thanks, I'm probably going to end up with an Intel 320 160GB x2 with RAID.
 
Intel is probably the most tested. Next would be Crucial. The Intel 510 is actually also a Marvell controller. The same one as the M4 and C300. The 320 is an intel in house like all the X25 G1/G2 drives.
I agree on avoiding Sandforce, Jmicron or OCZ/Indilinx for reliability. Just stay with the big boys (Intel/Samsung/Toshiba/Micron) I have had RMAs with all the small guys.
 
Rafale said:
Intel is probably the most tested. Next would be Crucial. The Intel 510 is actually also a Marvell controller. The same one as the M4 and C300. The 320 is an intel in house like all the X25 G1/G2 drives.
I agree on avoiding Sandforce, Jmicron or OCZ/Indilinx for reliability. Just stay with the big boys (Intel/Samsung/Toshiba/Micron) I have had RMAs with all the small guys.
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Thanks, I was thinking about the 510 since it isn't much more. I'd rather use the Intel controller though.
 
The 320 also has the built-in capacitors for power-failure protection. I'd say 320 all the way.
 
In my experience OCZ drives have had a habit of randomly dieing before the 9th month mark.
 
You *might* get the vertex back if you can manage to flash it - IF you can get the firmware software to see the drive at all.

I've had an Agility 1 go bad and OCZ replaced it with an Agility 2 (sandforce). However, the agility 2 started to flake out and corrupt itself - luckily I was able to flash it to later firmware and now it seems to work. However, I expect it to die at any time for any reason. I'll get OCZ to replace it and I'll use an Intel as my OS boot drive instead. That's the plan anyways. :)
 
Surly73 said:
I hadn't read that before - link?
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Here's one mention - some of the other reviews went into more detail.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review

Intel always prided itself on not storing any user data in its DRAM cache. The external DRAM is only used to cache mapping tables and serve as the controller's scratchpad. In the event of a sudden loss of power, Intel only has to commit whatever data it has in its SRAM to NAND. To minimize the amount of data loss in the event of a sudden power failure, Intel outfitted the SSD 320 with an array of six 470µF capacitors in parallel.

We've seen large capacitors on SSDs before, primarily the enterprise SandForce drives that boast a 0.09F supercap. Intel claims that for its design a single large capacitor isn't necessary given the minimal amount of data that's cached. It further claims that an array of multiple capacitors in parallel allows for much better reliability - if one capacitor fails the array is still useful (vs. a single point of failure in the case of the supercap).
Click to expand...
 
So this means that Joe Desktop PC could safely enable full write caching on one of these Intel 320s? Nice.

Is there any mention anywhere of whether the X25-M G2s definitely did or did not also have this feature?
 
The X25-M series do not have any power-loss capacitors. The 510 series has no capacitors. The 320 series does have the capacitors. It is easy to see if you look at the circuit boards (or photos of them).
 
john4200 said:
The X25-M series do not have any power-loss capacitors. The 510 series has no capacitors. The 320 series does have the capacitors. It is easy to see if you look at the circuit boards (or photos of them).
Click to expand...

Hmmmm.... (contemplates upgrading to a 320 even though I'm otherwise perfectly happy with my G2)
 
Surly73 said:
So this means that Joe Desktop PC could safely enable full write caching on one of these Intel 320s? Nice.

Is there any mention anywhere of whether the X25-M G2s definitely did or did not also have this feature?
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Full write caching of what ? The SSD uses its own cache without asking you, and if you use some feature that caches in your system's or SAS/SATA controller's RAM, those caps won't help.
 
He means the "high performance write" setting on the device. This setting allows the device to report that a physical write has been completed when it might not have been; as long as the cache is intrinsically safe, that's as good as performing the physical write.
 
Aesma said:
Full write caching of what ? The SSD uses its own cache without asking you, and if you use some feature that caches in your system's or SAS/SATA controller's RAM, those caps won't help.
Click to expand...

I mean full write caching in the OS. IIRC I've seen multiple levels which can be enabled and the "fastest" only says that you should enable it if your disk system has a battery backup so that blocks pushed by the OS into the controller/disk cache are flushed to disk on unexpected shutdown. The caps in the SSD would function as this battery backup something no consumer HDDs have. I don't have access to Win7 or to my SSD-equipped machine right now to see what the current list of options are.

I could be misremembering some details as I haven't been looking at such things recently.
 
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