Travel Technology - Cheap 512G SSD

Buy.com has an OCZ Agility 4 512GB 2.5" SATA III Solid State Drive for $319 (it was on sale earlier this week for $299) with free shipping. I just bought one of these for my laptop to replace the internal hard drive. It's now lightning! The Windows Performance hard drive score jumped from a 5.9 to 7.3. Booting takes less than half as long and shutdown is mere seconds. Programs load almost instantly. Mine is a run-of-the-mill HP laptop that I bought last fall for $600. Adding this drive has made it feel like a brand new machine.

Here's the link:

http://www.buy.com/prod/ocz-agility-4-512gb-2-5-sata-iii-solid-state-drive-ssd/231269305.html

Not a bad price but I think the price will drop even more on these as the year goes on.

There is no doubt that the drive performance makes a big difference in the user experience. I moved to SSD some time back and it was well worth the money.

I just picked up a 64GB Vertex 4 for $40 after $15 rebate at Newegg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227801 (use coupon code HARDOCPX829A)

This will go into my old Asus netbook, so anything more than 64GB would be overkill--especially since I'll probably hand it over to my kids.

I pretty frequently see great prices for various OCZ SSDs, but every time I "peel the onion" I seem to come across an inordinate amount of reports regarding premature drive failures.

I keep getting attracted to the headline prices for OCZ, but I think my hunt remains focused on Crucial or Intel SSDs.

Regards

I pretty frequently see great prices for various OCZ SSDs, but every time I "peel the onion" I seem to come across an inordinate amount of reports regarding premature drive failures.

I keep getting attracted to the headline prices for OCZ, but I think my hunt remains focused on Crucial or Intel SSDs.

Regards

Bear in mind the Vertex 4 uses an Indilinx controller instead of a Sandforce one like the Vertex 2 and 3 did (which were much more prone to faillure than other controllers).
I'm using a Crucial M4 256GB drive myself and couldn't be happier with it though, the fact that I got it cheap (350$, last year which is cheap compared to the €360 it was over here back then) makes it even better.

To answer the OP's question though, I'd go for a non-sandforce drive (Intel excepted) as sandforce drives tend to be cheaper, mainly by using cheaper quality NAND, which obviously doesn't help reliablility either.

Buy.com has an OCZ Agility 4 512GB 2.5" SATA III Solid State Drive for $319 (it was on sale earlier this week for $299) with free shipping. I just bought one of these for my laptop to replace the internal hard drive. It's now lightning! The Windows Performance hard drive score jumped from a 5.9 to 7.3. Booting takes less than half as long and shutdown is mere seconds. Programs load almost instantly. Mine is a run-of-the-mill HP laptop that I bought last fall for $600. Adding this drive has made it feel like a brand new machine.

Here's the link:

http://www.buy.com/prod/ocz-agility-4-512gb-2-5-sata-iii-solid-state-drive-ssd/231269305.html

:D I'm rocking a 512GB SSD in my MacBook Pro :D, 8GB of RAM, imagine the speed!

I keep getting attracted to the headline prices for OCZ, but I think my hunt remains focused on Crucial or Intel SSDs.


Crucial M4, Samsung 830, and SanDisk Extreme 120gb SSDs can be bought for $80 at various times the past month.

I'm still kicking myself I didn't pick up two SanDisk Extreme 240gb for $120 each when Staples mistakenly (and honored) offered them for that price. That would've been a sweet RAID0 setup.

Crucial M4, Samsung 830, and SanDisk Extreme 120gb SSDs can be bought for $80 at various times the past month.

I'm still kicking myself I didn't pick up two SanDisk Extreme 240gb for $120 each when Staples mistakenly (and honored) offered them for that price. That would've been a sweet RAID0 setup.I was wondering about a RAID5 SSD system. I'll bet it is lightning. I still can't get over how speedy my laptop has become. I overstated boot time -- it's down to 1:30 from nearly 6:00+ (I have a lot of stuff running), as measured by Soluto, and the pre-boot time (from turning on the laptop to desktop) is about 10 seconds, compared to a previous couple of minutes.

I pretty frequently see great prices for various OCZ SSDs, but every time I "peel the onion" I seem to come across an inordinate amount of reports regarding premature drive failures. Yes, I see those problems reported in many places.

Bear in mind the Vertex 4 uses an Indilinx controller instead of a Sandforce one like the Vertex 2 and 3 did (which were much more prone to faillure than other controllers).

Bang on.

I believe the Agility 4 also uses the same controller as the Vertex 4. However, OCZ has burned a lot of their customers' bridges with their Sandforce products. There's also the whole using an Nvidia MB SATA2 connection that will automatically get demoted to a SATA1 connection with the OCZ SF SATA3 controllers...

I was wondering about a RAID5 SSD system. I'll bet it is lightning. I still can't get over how speedy my laptop has become. I overstated boot time -- it's down to 1:30 from nearly 6:00+ (I have a lot of stuff running), as measured by Soluto, and the pre-boot time (from turning on the laptop to desktop) is about 10 seconds, compared to a previous couple of minutes.

I've been reading about how the latest SSD controllers will allow for TRIM functionality even when operating in a RAID configuration.

Given how short the SSD technological cycle is, it's all about brand, it's all about trust. Noone has the shortest idea what happens to these drives in two, three, five years because noone had the technology that many years ago. OCZ worked quite hard to lose it. Intel, Samsung and Crucial worked hard to build it.

I bought a Crucial m4 256GB mSATA to replace my Samsung 128GB.

Given how short the SSD technological cycle is, it's all about brand, it's all about trust. Noone has the shortest idea what happens to these drives in two, three, five years because noone had the technology that many years ago. OCZ worked quite hard to lose it. Intel, Samsung and Crucial worked hard to build it.

I bought a Crucial m4 256GB mSATA to replace my Samsung 128GB.I don't expect to be using the same laptop in 3 or 5 years. Meanwhile, I love this drive.

I pretty frequently see great prices for various OCZ SSDs, but every time I "peel the onion" I seem to come across an inordinate amount of reports regarding premature drive failures.

I keep getting attracted to the headline prices for OCZ, but I think my hunt remains focused on Crucial or Intel SSDs.


I've had very good luck with Sandforce-based drives, both at work and at home; the OCZ Vertex 3 and Deneva 2, Corsair Force 2/Force 3/Force GT, and Intel 520-series specifically.

(The OCZ Agility 3 and Intel 330 are similar to the Force 3, but we only bought the slower drives from Corsair before prices came down; now that prices are closer on the faster drives it's rarely worth bothering with the slower ones for our use. Most people won't care.)

We've had an unacceptably rate of drive errors causing data loss with Marvell controller drives from Crucial (both C300 and m4) and Intel (510 series), and I personally recommend against using anything with the Marvell controller (or the related Indilynx Everest 2 used in the newer OCZ drives -- Vertex 4 and Agility 4 -- OCZ/Indilynx licensed the controller design and then "improved" it.)

The Intel 320-series ones are super-reliable, but they are way slow for gaming or professional software development use these days (going from a 320 series to a 520 series cut the build time for my company's product from about 9 minutes to 7 minutes on my laptop... not trivial!), and while a lot of home users won't notice the difference they're also more expensive than the 520 series, to boot.

The Samsung 830s are also worth looking at; we've only used them as repackaged and sold by Dell under their own brand, but we've had excellent reliability in laptop use, and they're much faster than the Intel 320s.

To answer the OP's question though, I'd go for a non-sandforce drive (Intel excepted) as sandforce drives tend to be cheaper, mainly by using cheaper quality NAND, which obviously doesn't help reliablility either.

NAND quality has nothing to do with the controller, and every major manufacturer I'm aware of that sells Sandforce-based drives sells more than one line based on the type and quality of the flash; Corsair sells 3 (Force 3 on async, Force GT on sync, and Force GS on toggle) and OCZ more than that although the main Agility/Vertex difference (async/sync) is the same between the Sandforce-based 3-series and the Indilynx-based 4-series.

I was wondering about a RAID5 SSD system. I'll bet it is lightning. I still can't get over how speedy my laptop has become. I overstated boot time -- it's down to 1:30 from nearly 6:00+ (I have a lot of stuff running), as measured by Soluto, and the pre-boot time (from turning on the laptop to desktop) is about 10 seconds, compared to a previous couple of minutes.

A lot of RAID controllers don't play well with SSDs; the controller quickly becomes a bottleneck relative to the potential speed of a group of drives. My predecessor at my job built out a lot of systems with a two-drive RAID0 of SSDs, and removing the (granted, rather dated) RAID controller and putting straight-through SATA to a single drive proved faster.

With a new enough controller, and careful tuning, RAIDed SSDs can work wonders, although I've only tried it for database workloads.

I've been reading about how the latest SSD controllers will allow for TRIM functionality even when operating in a RAID configuration.

That's got nothing to do with the SSD controllers; it's entirely up to the RAID controllers, but yes, better controllers from the latest generation will pass through the TRIM (or properly translate SCSI UNMAP to TRIM) in some or all RAID configurations while the prior generation would not.

I don't expect to be using the same laptop in 3 or 5 years. Meanwhile, I love this drive.

The 160gb, 2009-vintage X25-M that is just less than 3 years old passed through about a laptop a year -- three of mine before I upgraded it to a 300gb last fall, and then into my wife's system (one system back of mine, originally). Still running great.

My first-generation 80gb (trim-less 50nm X25-M) Intel SSD is still in active use as a home server boot drive; I'm pretty sure I bought that in 2008, so it's going on 4 years or a bit past. We've got plenty of 2009-vintage 160gb X25-M running in both servers (with an abusive write-heavy workload) and developer desktops, and the failure rate has been below that of physical disks in both.

At this point, I'd expect a separately-purchased SSD to last longer than my use of the machine, whether it got sold/given away with the machine or more likely pulled when the machine was disposed of.

> RAID5 SSD system. I'll bet it is lightning.

RAID1 will be faster & cheaper than RAID5
for most users. If you're talking servers, then
you'll probably be better served by RAID6 than
RAID5.

> RAID5 SSD system. I'll bet it is lightning.

RAID1 will be faster & cheaper than RAID5
for most users. If you're talking servers, then
you'll probably be better served by RAID6 than
RAID5.
I've got a server on my own home LAN. It doesn't support RAID6, but I like the security of RAID5 over RAID. It's all dreaming for me, anyway, because I'm not about to buy 4 1Tb SSDs. :)

Been running several Samsung drives for some time now - rock solid. Upgraded from 120's to 240's and sooner or later I see getting 512's when the price comes down even more.

RAID1 will be faster & cheaper than RAID5
for most users. If you're talking servers, then
you'll probably be better served by RAID6 than
RAID5.

For big file servers running off big/slow nearline SAS disks, RAID6 is de rigeur these days... assuming they have a powerful enough controller that the performance isn't horrible. There are plenty of machines out there with pre-2009-generation RAID controllers where I would not use RAID6 even for a file server. RAID6 on a PERC5 or PERC6 is too slow for even some very mundane uses.

For the kind of server workloads that run on SSD, the computation overhead of RAID6 parity (and often the write-penalty overhead of RAID5) tends to be a non-starter on physical drives; you're pretty much always looking at mirroring two drives (RAID1), or doing stripe+mirroring (RAID10), and that conventional wisdom has so far carried over onto SSDs. I haven't seen detailed benchmarking to see if it's still true (the random read performance of SSDs being what it is, it may not be.)

The only exceptions I've actually seen in practice is when using the SSDs as a cache as part of an enterprise storage system (EMC, NetApp, Compellent, that sort of thing) where the RAID level of the SSDs often has to match that of the data drives.

For the right sort of heavily-random-read workloads, RAID5 of SSD would make a lot of sense.

As for home users, I'm not sure what someone would need a RAID of SSDs, and for the "but it's really, really cool" or "in case I drop it" arguments, RAID5 is much more economical and the performance difference between that and a similar cost RAID10 is not going to be noticeable outside of enterprise applications.

[* still I think a very important but underrated reason to consider an SSD -- I'd be putting one in my laptop even if it were SLOWER than a physical disk, because I used to kill about a laptop hard drive a year with drops and shocks, and combination of replacement cost and the risk of data loss is really effing annoying. ]

I've got a server on my own home LAN. It doesn't support RAID6, but I like the security of RAID5 over RAID.

RAID1 is more secure than RAID5 (and actually, while it's not textbook RAID1, the really paranoid these days do 3-way mirroring, and it's usually subsumed as a special case of RAID1.)

It's all dreaming for me, anyway, because I'm not about to buy 4 1Tb SSDs. :)

You're missing the word "yet." Although in practice, before that becomes cost effective, you might look at using an array of large SATA disks in a RAID 5 (or 6) with an SSD cache attached (say, a pair of 120gb or 240gb drives)... for a lot of purposes, it's the best of both worlds.
(Although the benchmarking I've done on it that looks super is on servers where the RAID is 22 rather faster spinners and 2 SSDs as cache rather than big 7200rpm drives.)

(FWIW, performance tuning and analysis of this sort pretty much IS my day job these days.)

You're missing the word "yet." Although in practice, before that becomes cost effective, you might look at using an array of large SATA disks in a RAID 5 (or 6) with an SSD cache attached (say, a pair of 120gb or 240gb drives)... for a lot of purposes, it's the best of both worlds.
(Although the benchmarking I've done on it that looks super is on servers where the RAID is 22 rather faster spinners and 2 SSDs as cache rather than big 7200rpm drives.)Until something faster than 1gb NICs and switches become standard (and affordable), I don't think I really need it. I do audio and video editing to a 3TB 4-drive SATA RAID5 system in my desktop, which gets backed-up nightly to my 3TB RAID5 server. Until LAN speeds approach SATA speeds and I can edit directly from my server, there's not much point in a super-speed server, at least at my house where it's just me and my wife. I am playing around with setting up Microsoft Server 2003 on a spare machine so I can fool around with Exchange Server but that, too, should do fine with the server set-up I've got. Though I'm reasonably computer conversant, I am far, far from professional level; I managed to get Server 2003 up and running, but Exchange Server, so far, isn't working -- I've bought a couple of books. :)

I'd really like to get an Asterix/FreePBX server going, but I haven't gotten around to getting digital phone trunks -- too expensive.

(FWIW, performance tuning and analysis of this sort pretty much IS my day job these days.)Which why you know a heck of a lot more about this then I. :)

Until something faster than 1gb NICs and switches become standard (and affordable),

10GbE became standard in servers this Spring (in the sense of "available built onto the motherboard on a lot of models," it's been an IEEE standard for several years), although "affordable" it isn't, even in server-hardware terms.

In a single-client, single-server situation, you could probably find two 10GbE cards and a 5M cable for a little less than $1000, but it's hard to imagine why that'd be worthwhile.

I don't think I really need it. I do audio and video editing to a 3TB 4-drive SATA RAID5 system in my desktop, which gets backed-up nightly to my 3TB RAID5 server. Until LAN speeds approach SATA speeds and I can edit directly from my server, there's not much point in a super-speed server, at least at my house where it's just me and my wife.

The advantage of SSD in an array like that, whether for cache or for the main array, is for latency, and random access (or competing internally-sequential accesses) rather than for raw bandwidth. Even on the server side, the number of applications that need the extra bandwidth are much smaller than the number which feel a whole lot faster with SSD caching -- for example, on a file server, if you have a bunch of people doing a lot of small writes. I could see it happening on my home media system in a few years when it's my wife and I and a kid or two rather than just my wife and I and an occasional house-guest.

I am playing around with setting up Microsoft Server 2003 on a spare machine so I can fool around with Exchange Server but that, too, should do fine with the server set-up I've got. Though I'm reasonably computer conversant, I am far, far from professional level; I managed to get Server 2003 up and running, but Exchange Server, so far, isn't working -- I've bought a couple of books. :)

Server 2003 is pretty miserable, being XP-based and lacking support for newer hardware (or much of any OOTB hardware; 2008/Vista improved the amount of fairly standard older stuff you didn't need drivers for, in addition to supporting newer stuff)... I haven't played with Exchange Server since the 1990s, but I'm told by our Windows admin at work that 2010 is way, way nicer (and requires a great deal less disk performance.)

If you get too stuck, feel free and shoot me a PM - our Windows guy is a nice guy, and he was stuck on 2003 until this past Spring, so I'd imagine he knows it cold.

If you want to RAID0 two 240GB SanDisk Extremes, you can do it for $310.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?SID=uVy6GPnLEeGFsm7jEQkWzwsv_0_iSJ_0_ 0&AID=10440897&PID=1225267&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-cables-_-na-_-na&Item=N82E16820171568

Also available at Amazon for the same price, but will take longer to ship.

If you want to RAID0 two 240GB SanDisk Extremes, you can do it for $310.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?SID=uVy6GPnLEeGFsm7jEQkWzwsv_0_iSJ_0_ 0&AID=10440897&PID=1225267&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-cables-_-na-_-na&Item=N82E16820171568

Also available at Amazon for the same price, but will take longer to ship.

Back up to $215 on NewEgg, and $181, alas.

We haven't used Sandisk SSDs at work, but general experience is that Sandforce-based SSDs are all pretty interchangeable. Latest firmware from the Sandisk is this April, which is pretty recent, so the teething pains others have seen from older SF-2000-series-based SSDs should be gone.

Which is a good piece of general advice I should add for anyone using Sandforce SSDs (other than the Intels, where they were late entrants and the initial-ship firmware was "good enough"): always check that the firmware is current when you buy a new drive. :)

We haven't used Sandisk SSDs at work, but general experience is that Sandforce-based SSDs are all pretty interchangeable. Latest firmware from the Sandisk is this April, which is pretty recent, so the teething pains others have seen from older SF-2000-series-based SSDs should be gone.


The general consensus on slickdeals is that SanDisk Extreme SSDs are equivalent to Crucial M4s and Samsung 830s.

The general consensus on slickdeals is that SanDisk Extreme SSDs are equivalent to Crucial M4s and Samsung 830s.

Three different controllers. The SanDisk Extremes are Sandforce-based, the Crucial M4s are Marvell-based, and the Samsung 830s use Samsung's own controller.

My vote there is "anything but Marvell."

Until something faster than 1gb NICs and switches become standard (and affordable),

You can search eBay for Infiniband host adapters. For $50 you get a card with two 20 gigabit ports. I have seen perfectly good 24 port switches (you might only get 8 usable though with 20 gigabit) for $250 again on eBay. You can run IP over Infiniband. Cheap enough?

You can search eBay for Infiniband host adapters. For $50 you get a card with two 20 gigabit ports. I have seen perfectly good 24 port switches (you might only get 8 usable though with 20 gigabit) for $250 again on eBay. You can run IP over Infiniband. Cheap enough?

Good grief, that stuff has gotten cheap on the used market. Hardly for the faint of heart, but if one needs a lot of switched bandwidth cheaply, that sounds impossible to beat.

For point to point use, there are some cheap 10GBit ethernet cards on Ebay, for around $150, that might be enough easier, but you're going to be spending a great deal more for anything approaching a 10GbE switch (the cheapest I see on eBay is a 4x 10GbE port model where it's actually 10GbE uplinks on a 48-port 1GB switch, $499)

NAND quality has nothing to do with the controller, and every major manufacturer I'm aware of that sells Sandforce-based drives sells more than one line based on the type and quality of the flash; Corsair sells 3 (Force 3 on async, Force GT on sync, and Force GS on toggle) and OCZ more than that although the main Agility/Vertex difference (async/sync) is the same between the Sandforce-based 3-series and the Indilynx-based 4-series.


I didn't say that either, what I meant was that cheaper quality NAND is more likely to fail than higher, more expensive, quality ones and I have yet to see a Samsung/Crucial/Intel drive use async NAND

I didn't say that either, what I meant was that cheaper quality NAND is more likely to fail than higher, more expensive, quality ones and I have yet to see a Samsung/Crucial/Intel drive use async NAND

Early reports that the Intel 330s would be using async NAND seem to have been proven false now that the drives are shipping. So in that sense, I was incorrect; while Intel has two speed grades, the slower speed grade of Sandforce drives (the 330) still uses sync NAND.

What you said was:
To answer the OP's question though, I'd go for a non-sandforce drive (Intel excepted) as sandforce drives tend to be cheaper, mainly by using cheaper quality NAND, which obviously doesn't help reliablility either.

My statement was just for Sandforce drives - you can by sync (and in some cases ONFI or Toggle) just as easily as async, just by paying a little more. You get more performance avoiding async, regardless of the reliability.

The faster, better regarded Sandforce drives don't use async. That said, I haven't seen a substantially higher failure rate with async-based drives; the only drive/controller I've seen a substantial difference with is the present generation Marvell controller (similar repeated failures in two different models, the Crucial m4 and the Intel 510), where the issue is corruption in power losses and crashes and not physical failures of the drive (doing a secure erase restores the drive to like-new condition, just better hope you have a backup as the corrupted area would become unusable until the drive was wiped.)

I've got a sandforce drive with async NAND (Corsair Force3) and a Crucial M4. The Corsair drive had issues in the beginning (completely locking up about 20mins after booting) but that was fixed with a firmware update and I haven't had any issues with it since.
That said, the cheaper OCZ Vertex and Agility 3 drives really did have higher faillure rates, which is also what gave all the sandforce drives the "crap" stigma on tech forums resulting in people massively recommending getting something like a Crucial M4 or a Samsung 830.

Buy.com has an OCZ Agility 4 512GB 2.5" SATA III Solid State Drive for $319 (it was on sale earlier this week for $299) with free shipping. I just bought one of these for my laptop to replace the internal hard drive.
Could you perhaps give a brief overview of what you did to transfer your existing disk content (including OS) to the new drive?

Thanks.

Could you perhaps give a brief overview of what you did to transfer your existing disk content (including OS) to the new drive?

Not the OP, but I usually recommend http://www.clonezilla.org/ as a good, free and open-source imaging solution

Could you perhaps give a brief overview of what you did to transfer your existing disk content (including OS) to the new drive?

Thanks.Sure. It was a piece of cake.

I used an old USB drive as a source for a USB-to-SATA adapter and plugged the new SSD into my laptop. I used the free AOMEI Partition Assistant Home Edition to move the primary hard drive to the SSD (there's a single-click option for doing that). If I recall correctly, it might have taken an hour or two. When it was done, I popped the old hard-drive out of the laptop and popped in the new SSD. It booted perfectly, and FAST!

Could you perhaps give a brief overview of what you did to transfer your existing disk content (including OS) to the new drive?

Thanks.

There are various drive cloning programs out there.

Beware that when cloning to a SSD there are alignment issues that don't apply to hard drives. There are utilities to deal with this, I don't recall any names as I've never needed to actually do it.

Sure. It was a piece of cake.

I used an old USB drive as a source for a USB-to-SATA adapter and plugged the new SSD into my laptop. I used the free AOMEI Partition Assistant Home Edition to move the primary hard drive to the SSD (there's a single-click option for doing that). If I recall correctly, it might have taken an hour or two. When it was done, I popped the old hard-drive out of the laptop and popped in the new SSD. It booted perfectly, and FAST!

Also, over the years I've done various clone operations. It's not unusual for the first boot of the new drive to cause an error but then it works correctly after that.

The problem is the cloning program normally has to reboot to do it's job and it leaves itself set to load instead of Windows. This gets cloned to the target drive--but it's no longer in a position to actually do the operation and it throws an error. It resets the system to boot normally, though, and so the error only appears once. It's scary but harmless.

There are various drive cloning programs out there.

Beware that when cloning to a SSD there are alignment issues that don't apply to hard drives. There are utilities to deal with this, I don't recall any names as I've never needed to actually do it.

Modern cloning utilities will handle it for you, without the need for a separate alignment tool, and Windows 7* will by default use a 1MB alignment which should be safe with any SSD out there.

If by some chance you have an unaligned drive (especially one with the default Windows XP-type "cylinder-level alignment" starting at sector 63) the best way to fix it is to do a partition-level clone rather than a full-disk clone -- and clone into a properly aligned location.

One popular corporate tool (Acronis) was VERY late to the party on alignment, but I believe even they've fixed that by now.

(* ideally, you should not run anything older with an SSD to begin with.)

BuyDig has the 512GB Agility 4 for $289 with an upgrade kit and free shipping...

http://www.buydig.com/shop/product.aspx?sku=E1OCZAG4512GB
Coupon Code: SSD512

BuyDig has the 512GB Agility 4 for $289 with an upgrade kit and free shipping...

http://www.buydig.com/shop/product.aspx?sku=E1OCZAG4512GB
Coupon Code: SSD512Thank you! I was so happy with my first one, I wanted to get another for my home desktop, but the price had increased to around $369. I just grabbed one from buydig.