New Intel flash hardness performs faster for less Intel has a new budget 330-series solid-state drive (SSD) coming on Friday, 13 April, according to Amazon and other online bazaars, and it almost doubles the current 320 SSD's performance. Amazon UK lists the 120GB 2.5-inch Intel 330 SSD for £109.05. A Google search on its part number, SSDSC2CT120A3K5, will find dozens of …
Which is why I have several 320s (120GB, 80GB and 2x 40GB), that and their capacitors to preserve data. Been very reliable drives for me and honestly as fast as most low end systems need, the bottleneck seemed to swing back towards the CPU in my laptop, server and to an extent Media PC.
Are the 330 Sandforce based, Marvell or an Intel design??
@Doug 14 - I agree. I've been looking at the idea of getting an SSD for my C drive, but I talked to a local shop who have currently stopped selling them as they've had about a 50% failure rate and they're getting pi$$ed off with having to deal with so many returns and upset customers!
I'd be curious if there was some way to know how much of that 50% was compatibility problems vs. actual failures. I'd also be curious what brands, and how long ago they had this experience.
Should also be mentioned that most SSD failures are bricking - a lot of people get all torqued up about write endurance, but for a properly configured machine (i.e. an OS that knows not to try and defrag, etc) it's a non-issue for even relatively heavy (assuming Anand's usage qualifies as relatively heavy) usage for an easy 3-5 years. Workstations and servers are a different story of course.
SSDs aren't perfect - don't get me wrong - but their benefits are HUGE. FWIW, Intel has the best rep for reliability - even, it seems, with their Sandforce-based SSDs - with Samsung and Crucial (Micron) having pretty decent reps for reliability too. They seem to be getting more reliable with each new generation, and compatibility is less and less of an issue over time as well.
Just don't get distracted with IOPS and MBps - the fastest drives are often the most temperamental. They call it bleeding edge for a reason : )
You think anyone would continue to sell product with that kind of failure and return rate? Not hard to find SSD vendors.
I have a two year old 160GB X25M which has racked up 13,500 power on hours, and 1070 power cycles. It has 5.3TB of writes, 1 reallocated sector, 99% reserved space and 98% wear left.
It might die tomorrow like any other drive but it hasn't been a scrap of bother in 2 years.
The importance of the IOPS is to know (or have a rough idea, at least) how the SSD would perform doing small writes/reads.
Think about it for a moment.
Case 1: I am writing a movie to the SSD; The IOPS count is low, and the bandwidth used is high. Not so important the IOPS here.
Case 2: A file server. Not a media server, a file server. It has to read/write thousands of small files (word, excel, text documents, and so on). Now the IOPS are relevant - because each file would count. In a situation like this one could, easily, get choked with the number os IOPS, and never scratch the speed of read/write.
What? This is a consumer product, not a server one ? Fair enough. Imagine you are a developer, and your project (along with dependencies and libraries) have thousands of small files. Or, even better, think about your boot! Yes, all OS (Linux, Windows, BSD, whatever) read a huge amount of small files - and here the IOPS are important.
So, yes. The IOPS are a very real and important metric. Maybe not to everyone, but to call it bogus...
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