Quality SSD Brands?

[DrGravitas]

Both my 512 GB HDD and 256 GB SSD are nearing capacity. While I could free up a bit on the HDD, it won't be a whole lot and I feel it's time to add another SSD into the mix. It has been quite a while since I looked for parts and I know SSDs move fast. What's more, the websites I used to turn to for reviews have really changed and I don't think I trust them any more.

So, I am looking for a >= 1 TB SSD with a focus on good quality. Does anybody have any suggestions on what brands they prefer? Also, I am I right to assume that a PCIe interfacing drive is a bit much for my purposes (3D modelling, with a fair bit of read/write but rarely over a couple hundred megabytes of filesize) and that SATA 3 will be more than sufficient?

[Chrysocyon]

I don't know much about them, I haven't been keeping up with SSD stuff, so I'd be open to recommendations as well.  I've been looking for a small one too.  I already have an HDD RAID 0 setup, which has faster transfer speeds than an SSD, but I would like to use the faster access rates of an SSD as a boot drive with all my program files.

[Zytan]

Never had any issues with Kingston personally

[Onnes]

Samsung's been the king of the consumer space for the past few years. Outside of some bad models like the 840 EVO, they've had pretty consistent performance and reliability at extremely low prices. I have a 512 GB 850 EVO as the OS drive on my desktop, and it has performed identically to the review benchmarks I've seen and hasn't had any issues so far.

[Draconas]

Intel/mushkin/sandisk/samsung/kingston are good brands from word of mouth

personally i've had a corsair 64GB SSD in my system for nearly 5 years just as a cache drive, at 50TB writes with 80% life remaining, seems solid.
recently purchased a OCZ trion 100 240GB, reviews of it were not good but it was a black friday buy, thus far it's lived.

hopefully relevant videos

https://youtu.be/opwON-7J_wI 

https://youtu.be/Jciz_QPcZEg

so really only grab a pci-e SSD if you can afford and would benefit from it
grab a m.2 SSD if you have the compatible connector (iirc there's a PCI-e type adapter for m.2 SSD's)
if nothing else, there's nothing wrong with a sata 3 SSD, it'll be bottlenecked but still faster than any spindle drive

Edited January 5, 2016 by Draconas
attempted youtube embedding didn't work

[Spot]

My Samsung 840 PRO is still kicking ass. I feel sorry for anyone that doesn't have an SSD, especially laptop users.

[I Did It For The Cat Girls]

Toshiba. 

[Fantasma]

I bought a couple of transcend 128gb SSDs for a little under $60. They seem nice.

[Spot]

On 12/29/2015 at 1:07 PM, Onnes said:

Outside of some bad models like the 840 EVO

Bullshit. I have been using mine consistently for over a year now and there is nothing wrong with it. Most of the bugs have been fixed with firmware updates.

[Spot]

10 minutes ago, 6tails said:

Minus the fact my 840 Pro actually LOST SPEED to the tune of 25% with the firmware update.

Mine actually gained it. Funny that...

[Spot]

Just now, 6tails said:

My boot  timeswent from 15 seconds to about 40 seconds just on installing the firmware update. Less than impressed, moved to Crucial and Mushkin, similar performance for far less.

Then yours is a dud. I have heard those two have bad controllers, namely Crucial.

[Onnes]

1 hour ago, Mr. Fox said:

Bullshit. I have been using mine consistently for over a year now and there is nothing wrong with it. Most of the bugs have been fixed with firmware updates.

First, you said above that you have an 840 PRO, not EVO. These are not the same drive; the PRO uses MLC NAND whereas the EVO uses TLC.

Second, if you want to know what's wrong with the 840 EVO, you can probably start with this AnandTech article.

Also, let me reiterate that this is a problem largely unique to the 840 EVO. Most other Samsung drives have only had the usual, more minor firmware tweaks and bugfixes.

[Spot]

6 minutes ago, Onnes said:

First, you said above that you have an 840 PRO, not EVO. These are not the same drive; the PRO uses MLC NAND whereas the EVO uses TLC.

Second, if you want to know what's wrong with the 840 EVO, you can probably start with this AnandTech article.

Also, let me reiterate that this is a problem largely unique to the 840 EVO. Most other Samsung drives have only had the usual, more minor firmware tweaks and bugfixes.

I have both the PRO AND the EVO. I am fully aware of the different memory types and bugs related to both, which is why it surprised me when you said the EVO is a bad model; grated that 6tails PRO has been so problematic. The EVO is supposed to have the performance degradation bug, but that was fixed in a firmware release. I have no problems with both in any way whatsoever. It'll be interesting to see which one lasts the longest (yes I know the PRO is supposed to).  

[Onnes]

1 hour ago, Mr. Fox said:

I have both the PRO AND the EVO. I am fully aware of the different memory types and bugs related to both, which is why it surprised me when you said the EVO is a bad model; grated that 6tails PRO has been so problematic.

Sorry for misunderstanding you, then.

 

1 hour ago, Mr. Fox said:

 The EVO is supposed to have the performance degradation bug, but that was fixed in a firmware release. I have no problems with both in any way whatsoever. It'll be interesting to see which one lasts the longest (yes I know the PRO is supposed to).  

This wasn't a 'Damn, we shipped a bug in the firmware; better fix it ASAP.' kind of problem. This was full 'Holy shit, our architecture is fundamentally flawed. What the fuck do we even do?!' It took them almost 2 years to release a real firmware fix. That fix worked by periodically refreshing data on the drive -- which is to say erasing and writing data -- meaning that it will lead to additional wear and lower the potential lifetime of the drive.

That's not just a bug. That's a permanent fuckup.

[Spot]

10 hours ago, Onnes said:

That fix worked by periodically refreshing data on the drive -- which is to say erasing and writing data -- meaning that it will lead to additional wear and lower the potential lifetime of the drive.

 

Keeping that in mind, and I was aware of this before buying it, as long as the drive lasts it's warranty date, I have absolutely regrets with my purchas. It was on sale anyway. In fact (and it seems I have lost the article, I think Logan from Tek Syndicate done a review), rumor has it the EVO outlasts the PRO in some cases, despite the different memory types (and yes I know the MLC memory is supposed to have more read/write cycles).

Edited January 6, 2016 by Mr. Fox

[Xander Venterus]

As far as ive found avoid any SSD with TLC flash like the plague, they may show to be good performers and cheaper, but they have far less life expectancy and ive already seen one go bad, My office manager bought a OCZ Trion and we put it into his workstation.  it lasted about 2-3 months.

Ive has amazing luck with the Patriot Blaze, Blast, and Ignite SSDs with the new Phison controllers, I have a collection of them running in my Datacenter Servers and they run excellent in the Dell PowerEDGE on a H700 controller, they actually showup as dell supported drives and dont throw the non-authentic error that most non dell drives do.

I also have a Blast 500gb and a Ignite 240 that are mounted on PCI-E adapter cards in the main server and they perform amazing in VMware ESXi for over a year now.

I do minimize un-nessicery writes to them by running EXT2 filesystems on the guests so theres no journaling lag, and i also have all logs and cache folders mounted to a RAID 1 Array of 2 146gb 15,000 RPM SAS drives.  The box has dual quad core Xeons of the I7 Architecture, and 96gb of ram.

[Luccus]

10 hours ago, Xander Venterus said:

As far as ive found avoid any SSD with TLC flash like the plague, they may show to be good performers and cheaper, but they have far less life expectancy and ive already seen one go bad.

I've had a (Samsung) TLC SSD for years now. It still lasts and S.M.A.R.T. still gives out a 'good' condition.
These could be useful: pcworld

Keep in mind how much 200 written terabytes are for a 256 GB SSD (This is where the first 'signs of weakness' happen).

[Xander Venterus]

14 minutes ago, Luccus said:

I've had a (Samsung) TLC SSD for years now. It still lasts and S.M.A.R.T. still gives out a 'good' condition.
These could be useful: pcworld

Keep in mind how much 200 written terabytes are for a 256 GB SSD (This is where the first 'signs of weakness' happen).

For my purposes tho in servers there is a lot more write use than a normal workstation,  In a PC they could last a while, but id rather have the extra life expectancy than to go the cheaper route, just like i do with my motors and car parts.  Built to last, not built cheaply.

[Onnes]

51 minutes ago, Xander Venterus said:

For my purposes tho in servers there is a lot more write use than a normal workstation,  In a PC they could last a while, but id rather have the extra life expectancy than to go the cheaper route, just like i do with my motors and car parts.  Built to last, not built cheaply.

Given that the OP is asking about drives for a workstation, I doubt he's going to be writing anywhere near enough to actually wear out the current generation of TLC SSDs within any small number of years. No reason to buy enterprise priced components just for the sake of having enterprise priced components.
(Also, OCZ has a well-known history of controller problems, and the current lines are the first OCZ branded drives after they were acquired by Toshiba.)

[Luccus]

After 728 terabytes the first one (wich wasn't even TLC) died. And it was a 250GB drive, not a 1 TB one.
I don't think TLC vs MLC is even a good measurement. The controller algorithms they use are defining more than everything else (think of the SLC vs MLC endurance war).

Also: Think of the op question. This isn't your scenario.
For this samsung would have my recommendation (use them in workstations and private PCs - never failed me).

When I got my first SSD I also tried to minimize write cycles. Now I give a flying fuck.
I even completely image install my laptop (128GB EVO) every time I'm too lazy too clean up myself.

[Xander Venterus]

My drives arent enterprise drives, but there not cheapo either.

BTW, dont the TLCs have over-provisioning as in, a 250GB SSD would have more like 300-350GB of actual flash to make them live longer as dead sectors get de-activated.   Hence making them seem to last longer.

Also, if you do research on the new OCZ Trions, they are completely made by Toshiba, they just opted to use OCZs brand on them.  Even the controller is not OCZ tech at all. 100% toshiba tech inside.

Edited January 18, 2016 by Xander Venterus

[Onnes]

The Samsung 850 line has 9.1% overprovisioning for TLC and 7.6% overprovisioning for MLC out of the box. The higher end MLC drives usually set aside 20% for both endurance and performance reasons.

[Luccus]

21 minutes ago, Xander Venterus said:

BTW, dont SSDs have over-provisioning as in, a 250GB SSD would have more like 300-350GB of actual flash to make them live longer as dead sectors get de-activated.   Hence making them seem to last longer.

Somewhat corrected.

@Onnes You are just too quick ;D

Edited January 18, 2016 by Luccus

[Xander Venterus]

one of the reviews from Anandtech quotes the OCZ Trion at 25% overprovisioning

[Luccus]

1 minute ago, Xander Venterus said:

one of the reviews from Anandtech quotes the OCZ Trion at 25% overprovisioning

so...?

[Xander Venterus]

2 minutes ago, Luccus said:

so...?

its a lot of wasted space they planned for whatever reason, makes me think they werent so sure of their life expectancy either.

I also wasnt speaking toward the samsung models, as i dont use them.

Edited January 18, 2016 by Xander Venterus

[Onnes]

9 minutes ago, Xander Venterus said:

one of the reviews from Anandtech quotes the OCZ Trion at 25% overprovisioning

I think you're misreading the article. Anandtech is testing with both the bare over-provisioning and with larger over-provisioning set in software. From what I can see, the baseline is about 7% for the Trion 100 line.

[Luccus]

1 hour ago, Xander Venterus said:

its a lot of wasted space.

Its space vs life time expectancy See this.

Edited January 18, 2016 by Luccus

[DrGravitas]

Going to be honest, kind of forgot about this thread

On 1/18/2016 at 1:02 PM, Onnes said:

Given that the OP is asking about drives for a workstation, I doubt he's going to be writing anywhere near enough to actually wear out the current generation of TLC SSDs within any small number of years. No reason to buy enterprise priced components just for the sake of having enterprise priced components.
(Also, OCZ has a well-known history of controller problems, and the current lines are the first OCZ branded drives after they were acquired by Toshiba.)

One thing I did forget about when I wrote this thread: ZBrush uses my current SSD as a scratch disk. When it reaches its built-in memory limit (stupidly hardcoded to max at 6 GB even though it's a 64-bit program and I've got 32 GB of ram) it starts writing to the disk. A good session can see maybe 11 GB written to disk and marked free on exit (well, when it exits right, anyways.) It also manages 7 quicksave slots of about 100 MBs, writing round-robin style every 20 minutes or so as well as before/after certain operations.

Edited January 20, 2016 by DrGravitas
Grammar

[Onnes]

8 minutes ago, DrGravitas said:

Going to be honest, kind of forgot about this thread

One thing I did forget about when I wrote this thread: ZBrush uses my current SSD as a scratch disk. When it reaches its built-in memory limit (stupidly hardcoded to max at 6 GB even though it's a 64-bit program and I've got 32 GB of ram) it starts writing to the disk. A good session can see maybe 11 GB written to disk and marked free on exit (well, when it exits right, anyways.) It also manages 7 quicksave slots of about 100 MBs, writing round-robin style every 20 minutes or so as well as before/after certain operations.

I'm mostly familiar with Samsung in the current generation, so I can't say much about other brands. At 1TB, the 850 line is rated for 150TB of writes for both the PRO and EVO models; the EVO carries a five year warranty whereas the PRO has ten years. Actual endurance on the PRO model is higher than the EVO, though. Anandtech runs wear tests, so you can get a good idea of the numbers for both lines:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review/4

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8239/update-on-samsung-850-pro-endurance-vnand-die-size