RE: Return rates/reliability. That isn’t wrong, but it is old news. OCZ had some pretty bad models, particularly the Agility/Vertex 2, and Agility/Vertex 3 before the latest firmware. Those are all old stock/old model drives though. The latest OCZ models are essentially made by a totally different company and are not any worse than any other SSD in the same price. The biggest issue with OCZ drives now is they are usually too expensive (whereas they used to be the cheapest).
What data do you base this on?
That the newest Drives are Indilinx based (or Marvell in the case of Vertex/Agility 4) vs Sandforce based Vertex 2/3 is public knowledge: OCZ Vector SSD Review - Indilinx Barefoot 3 Becomes Reality | The SSD Review
That Vertex 2/3 drives were problematic is evident by the number of refurbished drives continually available and often on sale at newegg.com.
As far as reliability improvements I don’t have anything non-anecdotal unfortunately.
Just as I thought. You say the data is “old news” but it dates from three months ago. There isn’t really any newer news on this subject. Reliability data is inevitably in arrears, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be indicative.
You focus on OCZ but even if you leave out OCZ there is still a massive difference between the return rates for the three lowest and three highest return rates. Even Intel at third lowest has a return rate one third that of the next lowest.
Not only that but if you go back and look at 2010 figures, there were differences back then also. Which suggests that it has consistently been untrue to say that there are no real differences, and there is no good reason to think there will be no real differences in the future.
I guess I object in part to grouping reliability by “manufacturer” at all - since hardly any of those “manufacturers” actually make any of the parts of the SSD themselves, and indeed some of them sell pretty much the exact same SSD off the exact same assembly lines under different names and with marginally different firmwares. So when somebody like OCZ changes from Sandforce (one assembly line) to Marvel or Indilinx (totally different assembly lines, although might be the same NAND), it isn’t even really the same company making the drive at all.
Frankly all the data we have, your cite included, are pretty sketchy at best. I think the best data is probably user reviews (given a long enough time scale and enough reviews), which show Vertex 4 and (to a slightly lesser extent) Vector to be far better SSDs than Vertex 2 & 3
Which isn’t to say that I recommend OCZ anyway - Samsung (non-pro) is just as good and usually cheaper. But companies like AData and Sandisk (not listed, but always a big SSD maker - just in the OEM space, ie you buy an ultrabook with a sandisk drive), are often even cheaper than that, and frankly I think you should buy a current generation drive based almost solely on price.
I actually didn’t know that. How common is it?
Those don’t seem to be very useful statistics given the tiny sample sizes (except possibly for OCZ.)
Hey all i got another question. If i buy the 120gb samsung ssd and then decide to upgrade to the 250gb ssd, would i be able to use the 120gb ssd on another laptop?
Someone mentioned that windows 7 takes about 30gb of the hard drive and with excel thats another 5gb or so. So after you install all the necessary programs, how much of the total 120gb is used?
Also what happens to the 40gb in storage i have in my currently laptop? It currently used about 40gb out of 280gb. Would that 40gb i have in my laptop hard drive be moved to the ssd or is it separate? Im confused as my laptop has about 275gb hard drive but when you get the 120gb ssd, would that mean you have total of 395 gb hard drive?
Most notebooks except for a few only allow one drive to be installed at a time. You willl replace the 275 with the 120. If the OS is taking 30GB and the data is 40 gb and the drive is 120 you will have approx. 50 GB of data space left on the SSD drive.
Would most agree getting the 250gb would be better value than a 120gb one?
120gb cost about 105 and 250gb cost 175.
I’d go with the 250 just on $/GB, but look up some benchmarks for the drives you’re looking at. Smaller capacity SSDs may be slower if they don’t populate all of the channels of the flash controller.
Also if you want your laptop for a very long time, its safer to go with the 250gb one as oppose to 120gb one right? Because if the 120gb one fills up, then its going to be a problem assuming you dont want to delete stuff off of your ssd?
And another question is if i get the ssd lets say the 120gb for example. I would then need to remove my hdd in my laptop which is about 275gb and thus when i check my computer drive, it would show total of 120gb available instead of the 275gb?
Also since i have to take out my old hard drive, wouldn’t that mean all the stuff i have stored in my laptop would be removed?
Thats what confuses me a lot.
Yes, that’s exactly what it means unless you have a way to copy the data from the old drive to the new one. You may want to find a local computer shop to do the install for you since they should have everything they need to move the data from your old drive to the new one. If not you’ll probably need to at least get an external hard drive case to pop the new drive into while you copy everything over from the old drive.
After you do the upgrade don’t be shocked if real world performance isn’t improved that much. There are certainly some types of computing which are bound by disk performance but most everyday computer use (web browsing, word processing, & cet.) doesn’t fall into that category.
Well at the moment i dont have anything on my laptop that i need. I could just save the stuff on a usb as i dont have much on it and then copy it later.
But based on this, would getting a 250gb hard drive be the best long term solution if one doesnt want to do any copying or upgrading later on as oppose to a 120gb hard drive?
Also, so i would need to reinstall windows 7 and everything when i install the ssd right? Similar to like how i reinstall windows 7 for my laptop?
To be perfectly frank your best bet would be not to replace the hard drive on your older notebook. You are sacrificing capacity for a relatively minor uptick in overall speed. The main difference you will see is boot times and loading large programs, other than that speed gains will be barely perceptible. You will see more overall benefit if you wait to get an SSD for your next new notebook. Plus the drive controllers on the latest notebooks can work more effectively with the latest SSDs.
If you turn your notebook on and off multiple times during the day or are loading huge datasets or big programs the speed gains would be worth it, otherwise it’s questionable.
If you still want to do it the Kingston SSD kit has the external drive bay and drive transfer software included. It is perfect for a first time user. You would need to get these items separately if you got just a bare drive. Staples has them on sale at big discounts periodically. Also the 20% off coupons Staples doles out every week will normally work with SSD drive purchases.
Re onboard storage capacity this is not that big a deal IMO. Inexpensive 500 GB - 2 TB 2.5" external drives that will plug into the USB port can be had inexpensively. If you have an SSD you should be backing up your data regularly anyway.