Read OCZ support forums for enthusiastic, well-intentioned but ultimately meaningless self-help threads.
While the Intel products are generally known to be more stable, the Intel forums are completely without official involvement though so those are even more worthless.
Yes, strangely enough forums tend to discuss the failures.
The fact is, the problems are with older drives and firmware.
You should be backing up data on a weekly basis anyway. Personally I keep ALL my data on my mirrored hard disks. And I've has absolutely no problems with my Agility 3, and I use hybrid sleep on a regular basis.
I've had windows shit itself, but that's /slightly/ more to do with MSE missing several infections from malicious banner adverts in a row.
Obviously you should be backing up, but a lot of SSDs (and not just OCZ, although they are the most egregious) have serious firmware bugs that cause irrevocable data loss or significant usage constraints (bluescreens, reboots, stuttering, etc). These firmware bugs are invariably ironed out six months after release.
Pretty much. I got an Agility 3 at the end of last year, when it was well-tested.
As a side-note, the 2TB hard disks I use - Samsung F4EG's - also shipped with a data-eating bug which was patched in firmware.
That's pretty unlucky. I haven't even heard of a deadly firmware bug like that on hard drives in years. SSDs are much less mature.
That said, the percentage of hard drives I've had physically fail has increased exponentially in the past few years, coincidental with the shift to 1TB+ capacities and the move of manufacturing to Thailand. So backups are a must no matter what you're storing on.Originally Posted by stusser
(And yeah, the last big hard drive firmware snafu I recall was the Seagate Barracuda firmware debacle of 2009... Alas, early 1TB drives, so when they died, they took lots of data with them.)
I've had zero SSD issues with multiple Crucial and Intel drives. (I also have a smaller-capacity OCZ drive as a boot disc in my media center PC and I've been lucky there; no problems.)
I have two Intel X25 (one in laptop, one in desktop pc) and problems started after around a year.
I suddenly would get random freezes which would transition into bluescreens if I waited long enough. These BSODs did get more frequently.
The problem: By the nature of the failures it was hard to identify that it were the SSDs which were causing these issues. No hard disk diagnostic tool did report any errors and I even did a reinstall.
As I have the operating system installed on the SSD it isn't easy to check if the problems have gone away - with a firmware update for example - because I would have to reinstall the OS and reinstalling sucks.
I love SSDs but man, talk about a frustrating and expensive experience. I payed 300€ for the 160GB one!
Well, although the Vertex 2 turned out shit the other SSD (corsair force 2 80+) has been going since 1/11 without issues.. so far.
The last shitter here was 2 WD 2TB drives (EADS/EARS) shitting themselves in short order of each other. Didn't fail all the way but gradually corrupted without it being amazingly obvious that they were doing it to start with - writes wouldn't fail... then you go to read it, and oh ... I don't recall writing all that high ascii? What an immense pain.
Yay!
They were on my front porch when I got home, and I just submitted the rebates, going to install them tomorrow as I am too tired now.
I knew SSDs were small, but they are really small! :o
Also had to get a PCI-e 1x SATA III controller card , as I was out of ports on my mobo, I'll move over my dvd and blu drives to this mini card, and then use the onboard Intel controller 6GB ports for the new SSDs.
They're the same size as 2.5" laptop HDD. But it probably is a surprise when you're planning on putting it into a desktop. I need to get another to put into my desktop, maybe at the end of the year.
Kids, make sure your mbd is running in AHCI mode. Google it and no you can't blame me if something goes wrong!
Last night my 64GB intel SSD that I use for SRT poofed. The intel software tool said it was "not connected." Great. The system is about 2 months old.
I cold rebooted and reconnected it via the software tool and it seems to be working again. But I'll be running it without the write-caching for now...
did you run the Intel SSD toolbox ? it will tell you how healthy the drive is, I think the info it gives is useful.
If you're just using it for the cache, go crazy, use it until it implodes. No stress, when it dies you buy a new one and don't lose any data.
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