realible ssd - intel 520 good choice?

lukx

Limp Gawd
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Aug 5, 2003
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I'm looking for most reliable SSD will Intel 520 180GB be a good choice ? 3d graphic work, lot of saving and loading.
 
patriot wildfire, mushkin chronos series, Corsair most anything but mainly Force GT, plus ^^

but you asked reliable, historically and of all shipped SSD units, Intel has had the lowest rate of return/failure, I believe Corsair samsung and OCZ follow on that list, Kingston I believe was noticeably higher. The others such as Patriot, Kingston etc simply did not ship near as many overall, so there number were artifically high or low.

Failures are on thing, cause it can be attributed to customers not using them the way they should be, over benching them etc, or it can be manufacturer defect such as bad firmware and such, overall the second note it very rare.

I guess use it properly, get the speed and price you want, and I dont think it matters which drive you get to be honest, its like ram, how often have you heard of ram just up and dying unless it had its own faults or the user did somehting they were not supposed to, I bet the 2nd one is more likely :p
 
regarding ram I had 4 crucial sticks and all died with time one after another... I wasn't overclocking them , nothing , just normal use...
 
I'm looking for most reliable SSD will Intel 520 180GB be a good choice ? 3d graphic work, lot of saving and loading.

Intel SSDs have had one of if not the lowest return rate, but the 520 series is so new that I'm not sure if has had a chance to be reflected in the published return rates yet.

The "... lot of saving and loading" makes me think you should avoid SandForce controller drives and go with Marvell and Intel controllers as TypeRazor suggested.
 
patriot wildfire, mushkin chronos series, Corsair most anything but mainly Force GT, plus ^^

but you asked reliable, historically and of all shipped SSD units, Intel has had the lowest rate of return/failure, I believe Corsair samsung and OCZ

OCZ and corsair are actually pretty bad. A high failure rate mixed with ocz lying about specs and revision changes makes them pretty much the worse
 
If you are doing some real video work, won't you need better incompressible writes?
 
Well, to be honest, Intel would not have ever used a Sandforce controller in any of thier drives if it meant high failure, they are one of the main companies in making $ not losing it, and they like to keep thier "leet" appearence :)

Generally, Crucial M4 and others based around this controller, Patriot Wildfire, Mushkin Chronos, Samsung 830, and for now the absolute newest OCZ drive are simply put the absolute fastest for compressible and non compressible work.

As far as the lying about their specs etc, well I suppose that depends on the drive, the firmware, and popular opinion, I am using a OCZ Agility 3 60gb model FW 1.13 on an AMD based board, and even though ALOT of folks say AMD sata 6 performance, thier AHCI implementation and OCZ drives are the worst, I have nothing but good things to say so far, it is as fast as they claim it is for the little benchmarking I have done, and in real world use, granted its only 60gb so I am not using it as a game drive, but rather for OS and NEEDED OS stuff like antivirus and such, but I can tell you it is very fast, though it is on the low end of performance compared to say

Force GT, Samsung 830, Crucial M4 and the like, spec wise are quite a bit faster "supposedly" would the average user notice the difference, probably not, though they are quite a bit larger price wise. I can say 1 thing in OCZ case, thier firmware update process is pure crap, cannot have it set as an OS drive, cannot have it as a primary drive, which really defeats the purpose of using it as an OS drive now doesnt it.

Crucial and Corsair to my knowledge have much better FW updating methods, not that one usually needs to, but its nice that they are capable of doing so. Intel apprently has a very good way of doing this as well, not to mention they tweak thier FW quite well, but it costs you.

Far as the ram regard, I was just using it as an example, most folks will leave it on AUTO, it wont be clocked properly, sometimes the motherboard overvolts them, bad airflow, or even the ram makers themselves use very poorly made/mounted heatsinks, I was just saying, Generally, SSD(beyond controller issues) usually give out mostly due to user error, i.e filling the drive within 1% of its capacity, making them run real hot because " they dont need active airflow they run much cooler" or constantly benching them to see if thier speed is correct etc. Treat them the way they are designed an MOST times, they will last as long as they should, there is always freak occurences afterall.
 
i have 3 of the new intel 520 drives, 3 weeks running without 1 problem and theyre fast

its still on the early side but it seems intel's sandforce firmware is pretty solid
 
Thank you guys for your input! I think I will go with Intel 320. It will me anyway much faster than my standard hard drives and I need it only for system and programs to start and respond faster.
 
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