Legit Reviews

Have a Intel 160gb SSD. Noticed that shut down time was very long. Boot up time was getting slower as well. Yesterday Windows 7 said I had a hard drive problem and recommended a backup to D- drive. I did and rebooted and then my computer refused to boot. Gave a beep then another beep then nothing happened.

Guess it's time for another SSD. I would like to buy a Intel SSD, maybe the Intel 520 Series Cherryville. What are your thoughts about this SSD and what would you recommend instead?

Edit: I had the Intel tool box installed and it gave no issues.

you run crystal disk info?

I had an Intel X25-M 160GB drive die like that also...

One day it just died... Tried opening a folder and it was all corrupt. Exited and then started to get more errors in random parts of the drive. A few reboots later it was dead. Several areas of the NAND Flash died and the drive was totally corrupted and not recoverable. I always thought SSD's would be in a read only state when the NAND Flash failed, but that is not always true. If the NAND goes bad then it just dies in sectors. If the NAND is worn out then it defaults to a read only state as it is out of writes.

I'm personally using the HyperX SSD with the SandForce SF-2200 series controller and it's been problem free for 3+ months on Z77 (main system).

My other notebooks use Kingston V200 'budget' drives that i bought and are great (Marvell). All the LR test systems are using OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD's and they are nearly two years old with thousands of hours on all of them and all are flawless. Basically... You get a bad drive ever so often. Sucks though when it happens.

If you are wanting to go with a SandForce SF-2281 based drive, look at all the brands. One is not an overall winner and there is a pretty big price difference between some of the drives.

I use a 64GB Indilinx based ocz vertex on an older sata1 chip set, running 24/7 for ~18mths with an above average amount of writes per day, nothing major; just an occasional download, some tv shows via bittorrent and OS updates (which are daily)
This is also without ACHI / TRIM and only relying on the garbage collection.
Speeds went initially from ~128MB/sec to ~111MB/sec which isn't too bad
It also needs a firmware upgrade but the utility won't detect the drive with this laptop.
This is a "budget" drive and still works great.

When I get my new drive it's going to be Intel, 5 series or might even go for a 7 series enterprise drive.
I don't like the way these can die with no warning.
With mechanical drives:
I've always got notification when one is on it's way out and had a chance to save 99.9% of the data.
Leaving out the obvious dropping the HDD, lightning strike etc, i'm sure there's people who've lost 100% of data with no chance of saving it, I suspect with consumer grade SSD's the percentage is higher. We also expect a 5yr old HDD to be near EOL, but the endurance specs on a SSD exceed a HDD, even on consumer drives so you don't even think about failure in the first 3yrs.
Sandforce also seem to let their clients do their testing for them.
Every vendor (sorry work mode) "manufacturer" seems to have had major issues with Sandforce based drives at some point.
Intel seems to be the only one who puts stability, in lets face it the most important part of your PC; first.

I plan my next build will have a small "high-grade" (~32GB) ssd for the OS, another ~128GB "hi-grade" for virtualbox or KVM (basically vmware) OS builds. (this is due to constant writes/erases - hdd would do till I get the cash)
All my bulk data mirrored will be on a nas tucked away under the stairs.

If I was running Windows I'd get an Intel 5 or 7 series drive for the OS and the 128GB for games, then mechanical for the bulk data.
I think everyone should switch to a nas setup if your storage requirements exceed ~128GB


My main point, stick with Intel for your next SSD (Samsung 8 series 2nd)

K

Just ordered a Intel 520 Series Cherryville SSDSC2CW120A3K5 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD).

So is there a real performance increase if you have the OS on a seperate SSD from games and other programs?

Actually no, most programs benefit from being installed on the same SSD as the OS is on. Programs like Photo shop, auto cad, corel draw, photo pain, paint shop pro are just a few. Now placing games on a separate drive (HDD from the SSD with the OS installed you will lose a little bit on load times and saving, but this small loss of performance is still manageable on these types of programs.

Just an update: Looks like the SSD wasn't dead after all. It was my WD 1TB Black hard drive that is failing. I tried all the usual stuff including HDD Regenerator and no help. Trying to back up all my photos and other stuff on the Intel x25-m 160GB SSD. The new Intel 520 SSD 120GB hard drive is now my c/ drive. Wish I bought the 180GB instead. 120GB is a little small. skier, I guess you were right! I ran that windows experience index and I got a 7.7 compared to 7.6 with the x25-m. Big woop Not much faster than the old SSD.