crucial are my top SSD recommendation right now, in terms of speed, price, and reliability. The intel ones are good, but mostly use the same hardware as crucial, but without the lower price and higher performance.
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So stay away from like $120 60gb seagates etc? I was looking at Ncix for cheap ssd's for my new build for just the OS
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i'd say stay away from OCZ ...
their entire forums is ppl with problems regarding the same issue

Stay away from OCZ is a general consensus right now as their QA is crap. Also avoid Sandforce SF-2281 based drives for now because this random BSOD and failure is also a common issue and there is no firmware fix available yet. Crucial M4 and Intel 320/510 are the current top performer recommendations.

Personally I'm still using an old Vertex from the pre-28nm era and it's trucking along but wear and tear have me at less than 30% write life after less than a year in my laptop. My desktop killed one in about 6 months as a virtual machine host. Still, SSD>HDD no matter which one you get.

^What program do you use to check write life of your SSD?

SSDLife Free. It isn't perfect but I use it to check a couple stats. Rated write life, max/min/average cell write count. Mine is rated at 5000 writes per cell and my max is already up to 63xx and min at 38xx. 1.6GB reallocated so far. Eh, that's what spare area is for.

That's if the SSD manufacturers actually include spare area. I remember in a test by Tom's Hardware some SSD's didn't have much of a spare area, if any, whereas some (Intel afaik) included quite a lot of spare capacity.

Hence, 120GB vs 128GB SSD's.

I'm pretty sure that same article had a comparison of the different manufacturers spare area around the time that wear leveling started taking off in the first set of Sandforce based drives (Vertex 2 comes to mind). They all have spare area though it ranged from as little as 7% to 22%. Article might have been from Ars though.

Intel's have had a rep for reliable longevity and part of it was from increased spare area.

I'm not complaining or anything mind you. This pair of Vertex drives are my first SSD's and after the furor of people complaining about premature drive deaths I'm actually just wondering how long these things will really go before re-allocation finally goes above spare area. Spare drive is ready to go but even at this point with daily use I've seen no random failures. Knock on wood.

Edit: http://online.hddlife.com/ssdlife/9e...64a8fc8e9e8d1f
Reads as a 32 but it's a 96GB drive. Working life seems to go by my last reformat and reinstall which is odd. Powered on time is longer than working life =?

so i'm reading you can manually set the $ you want to use as a spare area. what's a reasonable amount or %? is this area a write-off or can this be reclaimed through a reformat (i'm guessing no ...)? so if i used an extremely large amount as a spare area, it means i can get much longer life out of it? this is confusing me with TRIM. better start googling.

spare area WAT?

Both my Vertex2's will hit a year old in October and so far I haven't had any problems with them, the one in my "server" computer is on 24/7.

Tom's hardware put out a handy SSD OS tweaking guide a while back that I found useful:

Can You Get More Space Or Speed From Your SSD? : Optimizing Precious Solid-State Storage

Lowering spare area on a Sandforce drive seems like a horrible idea, IMO. Just buy a bigger drive. If it can even be done easily.

And don't disable the page file, or prefetch.

I didn't touch the page file and prefetch settings on my machine, but I did disable hibernation and system restore and that gave me a few gigs extra space. My drives are only 60's so every bit helped.

Yeah hibernation and system restore are good to turn off. The rest of the settings can mess up how Windows works, and slow things down, etc.

my mobo/bios is only reading 1 stick of ram now ...

starting to think this is definately my mobo shitting out

Have another comp to try it on? Might be RAM/Mobo in your case but I had the same problem with my agility 3 drive a month back, drive died. Had a red light on the drive. Current Crucial M4 is flawless.

It's a headache to tweak my vertex 2 (FW: 1.33) to match the factory stated speed. Win7 64bit + 180gb Vertex 2 SSD, followed all the tweak guides on OCZ and other forums like disable this and that. ATTO keeps showing 280mb/s read and 170mb/s write.

As for the BSOD, I had the same problem few days ago, did some reading it's only video card problem. Updated the latest driver and it's all fine now.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start using your SSD, it is going to slow down. Some are worse than others.

Also with Sandforce drives, the amount their speed is determined by the type of data that is on the drive. More compressed data (archived files, videos, pictures, mp3s) = slower performance. Less compressed (Windows files, exe files, etc) = better performance. You can read more about this on the bottom of page 6 of my SSD review.

Typical data in your "program files" directory is about 45-55% compressible, which is what I use in my SSD reviews. I find this reflects best real-world performance. You can see the results on page 7. Remember that read performance is more important, since when you are loading programs, etc, most of the operations are reads.

i wanna jump on the SATA 6Gbits/s ...

what happened to the Asus U3S6 cards?

The one English review they link to doesn't even tell you what controller it's using :facepalm:

It was a fill-gap solution, and probably never intended to be used with devices such as SSDs that will actually make use of SATA3 bandwidth. I would avoid it, not that you can get it anyway.

There are several choices on Newegg, but for some reason product pages aren't loading for me, so I can't offer a recommendation.

Would you consider upgrading your motherboard? But then you will probably have to upgrade your CPU as well. IMO, the only good SATA3 controllers right now are the Intel X68 ones and the AMD SB950 one.

ya... i'm on 1156 and plan on using it for a while

i thought it would a great solution to have both next-gen (now current) techs on the same card ... guess i missed out.