Which SSD? - Does it Really Make a Difference?

[deeppow]

I doubt there is a factory with the name Corsair or OCZ or Mushkin or etc. over the door. I suspect these drives are made by one or more Chinese builders. Since the performance is so similar, are all the Sandforce drives all designed built by the same Chinese company?

That is true of many parts , Chinese made or not. But there are sellers by those names (or e-retailers that sell them) and those are the ones you deal with after purchase.

SandForce controllers are design by a US company (http://www.sandforce.com/), privately owned last time I checked. Who manufactures those controllers (the silcon itself) and the SSDs that use them is info I've never taken the trouble to find out. I can tell you that from my experience, the SSD failure rates do appear to be higher than HDs.

I tend to buy from e-retailers or the product companies themselves that I've found to provide excellent customer service even if it costs me more. As you have noted, dealing with an unsupportive company just isn't worth the hassle. Given your experience with OCZ I would NOT buy from them if I were you. Based on the discussion here related to them, I'll probably minimize any future purchases of their products too.

Good luck whatever you decide.

 

[Marshmallow64]

The design and blueprint are made over in the US. The manufacturing for the ssd is in Taiwan or China.

 

[diehrd]

I went with a kingston SSD 64gb .. Pulled a 10k Raptor and installed the kingston , Night and day performance gain , not in bench tests but in real world usage. I get 235/138 on the drive and I paid I think 109 at the time , this drive now can be had for 89.00 at some outlets on line.

Personally there are drives with faster speeds BUT there a lot more cash , and if I got one and installed it the performance increase i would get, would BE IN BENCH tests ,,, not real world like it was from spinning disk to ssd ..

 

[Iroq]

My 80 GB Intel G2 SSD is down to only 27 GB free and I expect that to slowly whittle away with time. I am going to replace it with a 120 GB SSD as the price is about right (circa $230) and the additional 40 GB should easily last another few years (I use a 750 GB HDD for data etc.).

I am narrowed down to the following three drives:

OCZ Vertex 2
Corsair CSSD-F120
Intel X25-M

The Corsair and OCZ are somewhat faster, especially when writing, but all three seem to be quality drives.

However, in real world use, I perceive that any of the three will be indistingushable from the others with respect to performance and long term reliability. I am simply going to clone my existing drive to the new one using EASEUS Disk copy.

I would be interested to hear others opinons before I spend $230.

Check out this thread at the OCZ Forums before you decide http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?84821-New-update-on-the-25nm-OCZ-SSD-drives there's a lot of unhappy users airing their feeling on the new Vertex 2 drives.

 

[Marshmallow64]

^ Yikes

 

[Volumetrik]

They aren't really happy. I would to if I bought a 150+$ SSD and find out I have to pay more to get the other gen.

 

[jmh547]

From what I read there it looks like most of the major brands are using the 25nm chips... I am hoping to order a SSD by the end of the week but heck after reading reviews on Kingston, OCZ, Corsair I'm not sure if it is worth it... it seems everyone has reliability problems with failures between 1 month and 1 year.