decission time

S_I_N

S_I_N

New member
well several weeks ago I had to sell off my C300 raid to pay bills. Things are alot better now and i find myself with some extra $$ and want to go back to the ssd side. Now currently I'm looking at a single Intel 330 180Gb ssd or a pair of Samsung 128's for raid 0 goodness again. I like raid 0 have never had any issues with it in my 3 decades of computer tweaking so raiding isnt an issue for me. But was wondering what y'all thought about it. Budget wise I'm looking at staying at or under 200$ USD
 
actually considering a single ssd atm maybe a 256Gb model what do you recommend?? I got those C300's as they were one of the first released with sata6gb/s and in raid they were the bomb but at 300ish read and 175ish write I know there are faster ones out there.

researching now lol
 
A brief round up:

Crucial M4s, Samsung 830s are fast and very reliable as well as being cheap.

Mushkin Chronos (and the deluxe) are also very good but not quite as reliable. Intel 520s are excellent all round but expensive.

The OCZs have been pretty poor largely because of the controller they used however the '4's now use sandforce which should have eliminated that issue but build quality is not a strong point.
 
Plenty of SSD reviews done on OC3D, dude. Give them a read :) At the end of the day, any modern SATA III SSD is plenty fast, but the M4s, 830s and 520s are the fastest (Crucial, Samsung and Intel respectively).
 
Josh lol please I'm not the normal newbie here that posts a question without researching. I have researched til my eyes hurt and i have read all the reviews on here. What I'm looking for is thoughts from our members. I agree the Intel ones are fast but ranking the M4's and Sammy's with them (for fastest mention) may be a bit off. Whiles most do have close to the same read speeds they lack in write which imho is just as important. What surprises me so far is no one has said anything about the Corsair line of ssd's they seem to be spot on with the fastest out there. Or the hyper x's.

anywho young'un I have read and researched just now looking for those with real experience with them. And seeing as the ones I was considering are now out of stock the reading and researching will continue.
 
Well, I myself have a pair of Mushkin Chronoses in RAID0. Never had any reliability issues with them, and they are very, very fast. However, I did have a tinker with them before I RAID0d them, and they were just as fast. RAIDing them, at least using my onboard RAID controller, did nothing for them.

In the OS, the Crucial and the Samsung are some of the fastest.

There is also the Samsung 840/840 Pro, but i'm hesitant to recommend them as they're new and relatively untested. Preliminary reviews of the 840 Pro prove it to be an extremely good drive.
 
I have a samsung 830 and have had no issues at all and it is damn fast. Low return rates too. I read way to many complaints about mushkin chonos drives so I would avoid them, you could get lucky and get a good one but then you might not....loosing the boot drive randomly is too much of a pain for me to even consider one. I have never really seen the point of raid 0 for SSDs and the higher capacity ones are faster than the small ones anyway.
 
S_I_N said:
what are your thoughts on the Hyper X 3K series??
Click to expand...
Well my biggest concern with SSDs has been reliability. The Sandforce controller (right up to including SF-2200) has been dodgy. SSDs with the SF-2200s have all topped the speed charts recently but they have also had the highest failure rates. On the other side of the scale for most people read speed has been far more important than the write speed so it makes sense to get something else that was reliable since all the drives are not noticeably slower in the reads (but are in the writes).

The alternatives have most commonly been Crucial, who used the Marvell controller and Samsung who used their own MCX controller, both of which are very reliable and fast with reads (500+) but a bit lacking with the writes (~350 vs up to 500 on SF).

The exception to this has been the work put in by Intel who wanted to use the speed of the SF controller but not have the reliability issues. They spent a lot of time developing the SF controller which is now present in the 520 series (SF-2281). As a result the 520 was at the top of the market in performance (and price) for a good while. You can now get a number of SSDs with the SF-2281 controller.

You'll find that companies like Kingston, corsair and OCZ have used the third party SF controller in various revisions across their SSD ranges so it's hard to single out companies individually and that clouds product reputation. I wouldn't recommend the Corsair Force GTs because they use the SF-2200, however the Corsair Neutron uses 2281 which by all accounts is awesome.

Basically if it's got 2281 it takes all the performance of the SF controller without the reliability hit (unless it is OCZ in which case the build quality can let them down). Otherwise you are looking at the other controllers from Samsung and Crucial which are a bit slower in the writes but are guaranteed to work.

Mushkin Chronos deluxe is worth a mention since it hasn't come up yet. It has SF-2281 and is very reasonably priced and built by a good manufacturer.
 
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Ok so I ended up getting an Intel 520 180Gb drive second hand from a very trusted seller on another forum. That and he had a 16GB 4*4GB kit of Crucial Ballistic Elites 1866 as well so snagged them also. I know I don't need 16Gb of memory, but it'll be nice to have in the eventuality I upgrade to 2011 got both items for 175$ SHIPPED with my 1866 GSkill Snipers added in 2*4GB kit.
 
aye mate I thought so as well seeing as the Elites are low cas low voltage models

Here are the specifications of the Crucial Ballistix Elite Quad Channel kit:
Model BLE2KIT4G3D1869DE1TX0
CAS Latency 9-9-9-27
Capacity 16GB (4GB x 4) Speed DDR3-1866 (PC3 14900)
Test Voltage 1.5 Volts Registered/Unbuffered Unbuffered
Error Checking Non-ECC
Type 240-pin DIMM
Features Intel XMP [FONT=inherit !important][FONT=inherit !important]Extreme [/FONT][/FONT][FONT=inherit !important]!important][FONT=inherit !important]Memory[/FONT][/FONT] Profile) Ready
 
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just an update to this old thread lol I managed to score a couple 240Gb Kingston Hyper X's on Neweggs Black Friday deals. So I'm going back for the kill with SSD raid this time with alot faster drives than my old C300's lol. cant wait to get them :)
 
im a big fan of equipment changes and have gone through 4 SSD updates. but....
and SIN, i ask what you do in this scenario..

i have to re-install the OS (Win7). and with that i have to re-activate.
i have no more activations left to legitimize my OS installs. they block my COA
and now i have to buy another license. what do you fellow members do on a multi-install?
i called MS and they said "there is nothing they can do..." that sounds like dung.
i found i can pay $200 for TechNet and have 2-yrs of activation, but c'mon
this is not a business.. i'm me, a hardware nut... so what do you cats do for
re-activation?

airdeano
 
Perturabo said:
I have a samsung 830 and have had no issues at all and it is damn fast. Low return rates too. I read way to many complaints about mushkin chonos drives so I would avoid them, you could get lucky and get a good one but then you might not....loosing the boot drive randomly is too much of a pain for me to even consider one. I have never really seen the point of raid 0 for SSDs and the higher capacity ones are faster than the small ones anyway.
Click to expand...

+1 - totally agree with him. I'm a happy Samsung-user too :lol: and the 256 GB version is about 140€ here.
 
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