which refurb SSD would you get and why

of these that is.

Corsair Force Series GT CSSD-F90GBGT/RF2 2.5" 90GB
OCZ Agility 3 AGT3-25SAT3-120G.20.RF
Corsair Force Series 3 CSSD-F120GB3/RF2
OCZ Vector Series VTR1-25SAT3-128G

i'm having a hard time making decisions here, kinda working my self into a loop. like the vector has good numbers for random 4k read and write but its max sequential write seems a bit low and the agility 3 has good sequential reads and writes but its random 4k's seem low and the corsairs have good numbers but nothing about their 4k random reads and the reviews seem kinda meh.

I'm just looking at sticking my OS on one of these, I'm not worried about losing any data because any thing I currently have will be on this old drive any way and I'm not formatting it on top of I don't store any file I absolutely have to have on a computer, at all.

I'm just looking for a speed boost, thought I would give this a shot since they are cheap

Sequential transfers, especially writes are not important for SSD. 90%+ operations in daily work are read transfers and writes are buffered anyway so if you are not working on large databases then you won't see any difference if SSD has 150 or 400MB/s sequential writes.
In this case Vector looks best.
On the other hand I wouldn't touch refurbished SSD. There was a reason it broke at the first place and there are only couple of chips on the PCB ... all depends how long will be warranty.

I have purchased several OCZ drives via newegg refurb without issue. The few corsair drives I've purchased (new or refurb) haven't lasted me more than 6 months, but of course YMMV.

IMO, spend $15-30 more and get a new one. Several models have dropped as low as around $70 lately, the Evo drops to $90 occasionally.

I also wouldn't touch a refurb for many reasons. They have much shorter warranties, for starters. If something else goes wrong after the short warranty has expired, you are just out of luck. Also, many refurbs are nothing but repackaged customer returns that may or may not have been inspected thoroughly.

You will be much better off saving up your shekels and springing for a new SSD with a decent warranty.

OCZ recently went bankrupt and was bought up by someone else. I would stay away from them for a while.

For $14.00 more then the Vector this would be my purchase.

Mandrake4565 said:

For $14.00 more then the Vector this would be my purchase.

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What he said. This is a much better drive.

well currently my windows drive is at 40 gigs, with a lot of crap on the desktop.
think I could get away with a 60gb drive

edit:
never mind not cost effective unless i'm buying new and not refurb

edit#2

alright I think I have decided, after running disk clean up and knowing theres a few gigs on the desktop at the moment I can get away with a 64 gig drive and I noticed these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227932

its cheap, has the same performance as the agility but its a cache drive out of the box, although nothing really differentiates it from a regular SSD other than a half partition. I did some research and found some people deleting the old partition using disk part and making a new one across the whole drive getting all 64 gigs. if it doesn't work then i'll just use as intended as a cache drive.

I mean hell, its $35 and if it works that'll be one hell of a deal, 64 gig SATA III refurb for under $50. at this point I think I just want something fun for my computer to make it faster. its already pretty up to date and I don't want to get something boring like a power supply.....although I should probably. plus I like getting things in the mail

Niku-Sama said:

well currently my windows drive is at 40 gigs, with a lot of crap on the desktop.
think I could get away with a 60gb drive

edit:
never mind not cost effective unless i'm buying new and not refurb

edit#2

alright I think I have decided, after running disk clean up and knowing theres a few gigs on the desktop at the moment I can get away with a 64 gig drive and I noticed these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227932

its cheap, has the same performance as the agility but its a cache drive out of the box, although nothing really differentiates it from a regular SSD other than a half partition. I did some research and found some people deleting the old partition using disk part and making a new one across the whole drive getting all 64 gigs. if it doesn't work then i'll just use as intended as a cache drive.

I mean hell, its $35 and if it works that'll be one hell of a deal, 64 gig SATA III refurb for under $50. at this point I think I just want something fun for my computer to make it faster. its already pretty up to date and I don't want to get something boring like a power supply.....although I should probably. plus I like getting things in the mail

Click to expand...

If you want to waste your money, go for it.

I get the feeling I won't waste any money on the cache drive because a ton got rma'd because "only half the space shows up"

Obviously not paying any attention to the specs on the box and the site

alright drive came in today popped in in and its pretty cool.
haven't done a whole lot with it because I am diagnosing claims that people are unlocking the other half of the drive using diskpart. combed the whole thing in diskpart and I am finding no such thing so either they caught the work around in a firmware update or the people out there are full of ****.

I'm thinking the latter
it came exactly as I figured it would, smart indicated that it had more read writes and power cycles than normally would be from a test bed but much less to be any thing more than some one trying to figure out why only 32gigs were showing up on their new drive. I also see a lot of people saying they are getting errors after setting up the drive on their existing system. I ran into the same problem but I knew what caused it and fixed it. OCZ says you can add these drives to your existing set up with out reinstalling windows, but they later go on to tell you in order to get max performance out of it to enable AHCI mode. well if you change your SATA settings from native or legacy IDE to AHCI then windows takes a crap and you have to re install OR change your settings back. apparently people opted for its all gone option and lost all their info when it was a simple bios setting they changed back to begin with. so for the time being its running native IDE for now (don't know why AHCI wasn't on when I installed before)

any way I did find out how ever the pcb is the same exact one in many agility 3 drives and probably others, figured this out by looking at the OCZ toolbox page and noticing the firmware for Agility 3, Revodrive 3, Solid 3, Synapse, Vertex 3 &3 Max IOPS have the same version and release date.

searching around looking at reviews a lot of places take them apart (including the reviewers here) and matching them up to one another, didn't take long.
so I'm pretty sure if I could get my hands on another drives firmware or edit the current firmware to match the agility 3 or vertex 3 then it should function as a standard size drive.

until then its working ok but I would like to try and find another way aside from ocztoolbox to do an offline firmware update. I did notice a jtag terminal, pretty sure that would work after you figured out to force it to take the new image and I don't think many people outside of the manufacturer have figured that out and would be a lot of work.

I'm still going to order another refurbed drive for my OS. I'm thinking corsair, will match the PSU I bought with this ssd now.

Are the flash chips replaced so the refurbished SSD will accept as many write cycles as a brand new SSD?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...m1132X509988X5923d078a5e5f69358e7772b2968d436
Agree on that one, on things like that I stay away from refurbished myself.

larrymoencurly said:

Are the flash chips replaced so the refurbished SSD will accept as many write cycles as a brand new SSD?

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i cant tell if any things been replaced, in all honesty if they replaced one I imagine they would replace them all but the power on time is pretty low so I don't think there was any thing wrong with the drive it self.

I did run some tests to verify the integrity of the drive and no errors and read write times were ok.

I turned AHCI mode on, re installed windows and tried using it as it was intended as a cache drive and the software they provide is complete and utter crap.
after getting everything updates and working as it should I installed the software to cache the boot drive. first reboot went as planned, second reboot it hung up so I left it.....

HOURS later it was still in the same spot so I rebooted only to be prompted with a "sudden power loss" message and to restore or disable. tried restore, come back an hour later and still at the same spot again, rebooted to disable and it took out a completely new updated and situated how I like it windows install wasting several hours of my day off.

really pissed me off...

the drive it self is fine, the software they use to make it work as it should doesn't work as it should and is complete CRAP.

reading around before I bought the thing I read plenty of things from OCZ and dataplex saying that your information is safe if any thing should happen to the SSD its still safe on your hard drive. well obviously its a ****ing lie

You were warned.

Any corsair refurbs I bought from newegg were either doa or died within 2 months. I still have the majority of the refurb ocz drives.

That said, do I have data on a refurb ssd that I couldn't lose? Absolutely not

no information was lost it just pissed me off that it wasted my time like that after getting it all updated and situated.
I don't keep ANY sort or irreplaceable information on a hard drive let alone a ssd or thumb drive

Mandrake4565 said:

For $14.00 more then the Vector this would be my purchase.

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Samsung was rated in 2013 with the least amount of DOA and RMAS in SSD last year. Saw it on a report linustech shared on his facebook (not done by him)

OCZ had the most less than a percent vs 3%

Niku-Sama said:

no information was lost it just pissed me off that it wasted my time like that after getting it all updated and situated.
I don't keep ANY sort or irreplaceable information on a hard drive let alone a ssd or thumb drive

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There is nothing wrong with keeping irreplaceable data on a HDD, SSD, etc. as long as it is properly backed up. Even original data, such as important paperwork, music CDS, videos, etc. are subject to loss unless backed up somehow. HDDs, etc. are actually more cost effective and require far, far less room to store.

I picked up a pair of the 128gb OCZ Vector Series for $140 on sale. Running in RAID0, so far so good. No critical data involved.

You do roll the dice with refurbs, I have bought 4-5 in the past year or so. All appeared to be new, all oem packaging with a oem refurb sticker, wd's, ocz's and Seagate's.