SSD durability question

Working very well for 3 months now without any issues! Still very snappy 50 seconds to get online after the BIOS screen the desktop shows in 15 to 20 seconds and I have to wait till my wireless adapter gets loaded which is the last thing! Great Drives these Mushkin Enhanced Callisto Deluxe drives are!

TH

 

Thanks Daniel for keeping us updated and for informing about Diskeeper Pro Premier 2011 with Hyperfast!
That program might well be usefull in case I want to get a new PC with a SSD drive (I'm still thinking about a new PC...). Bill also pointed me in another thread here to SSD's; glad I found this thread.

 

Your welcome Jan! These drives are fantastic and they have new models that support SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) http://www.mushkin.com/Digital-Storage/SSDs/MKNSSDCR240GB-DX.aspx in which when I get a new Laptop down the road I will going for them!

Daniel

 

fwiw, i have have been using a 1st gen intel SSD for about a year and i have had no problems whatsoever.

this is with me creating an image of it everyday and writing a full disk image back to the SSD at least once every week

this is way way way more writes per month than the average user. i also have an OCZ drive which i hardly write to but according to S.M.A.R.T the 1st gen intel is fairing better than the 2nd gen OCZ

edit- no special SSD monitoring software/utility ever used on the intel SSD

 

Thanks that's good to know! But I will be staying away from OCZ for the time being as the reviews on them are not very good!

TH

 

Prices need to seriously drop. I have a 500GB Hybrid Drive and I love it, the speed increase has been very noticeable.

I'll consider a SSD when they're less than 1$/Gb

 

ive been thinking about getting an SSD, but i think maybe ill just wait till im done University when i plan to invest in a new laptop to get one, hopefully by then prices will have gone down drastically and many of the kinks will be worked out

 

me too, well until they release their in-house Idilinux based controller which i have high hopes for.

 

I also heard that there support is not great?

TH

 

probably the worst from all SSD manufacturers

 

It is too bad. Way back when they were one of the best.

Been running my pair of Mushkin Callisto Deluxe 120's since mid December of last year. No defrag programs of any kind, no TRIM (RAID 0) and absolutely no loss of speed. Just ran an ATTO bench and they are as fast as the day I got them if not faster due to the last firmware update.

 

good to hear

going to be buying a corsair force GT 3 120GB, corsair have excellent after sales support and a very fast RMA turn around time in my area.

 

This is the one I'd like, but it's $$2179.00 at the moment OCZ SSD PCI-E (x4) RevoDrive3 X2 480GB4 x SATA Read: up to 1500 MB/s Write: up to 1250 MB/s

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/ocz_revodrive_x2_240gb_pci_express_ssd_review

 

typical Man U fan!!

 

Flash memories are available with two different kinds of memory density: SLC (Single-Level Cell) and MLC (Multiple-Level Cell). On SLC chips each storage circuit inside the chip stores only one bit of information, while on MLC chips each circuit stores more than one bit of information. Because of this, MLC chips are cheaper than SLC chips, since one MLC chip can hold more information than one SLC chip. Therefore cheaper SSD units use MLC chips, while more expensive units use SLC devices.

Because data bits inside the chip are closer to each other, MLC chips provide a higher error rate. It is important to note that these errors are not perceived by the user: the controller chip has an error-correction mechanism that detects such errors and automatically fixes them. However, locating and fixing errors takes time, reflecting in a lower performance. In plain English: MLC chips are slower than SLC chips.

Another disadvantage of MLC chips is that they have a shorter life-span compared to SLC chips (flash memories have a finite number of times you can write/erase data to them). Usually SLC chips allow up to 100,000 write/erase cycles before getting unreliable, while MLC chips have a limit of around 10,000 write/erase cycles. Some cheaper chips have lower limits.

Assuming that you have a 64 GB unit, these limits would allow you to write 64 GB 100,000 times on an SLC-based SSD and 64 GB 10,000 times on an MLC-based SSD.

But how long the unit will last? This will depend on the number of write/erase cycles the user performs a day. If we assume that an average user will write 50 GB per day every day, a 64 GB MLC drive would last 35 years (64 GB x 10,000 / 50 GB / 365 days) and a 64 GB SLC drive would last 350 years (64 GB x 100,000 / 50 GB / 365 days). Of course for MLC-based SSD's with a maximum write/erase cycle lower than 10,000, you will need to adjust the math.

Of course depending on the application you will write way more than 50 GB per day (for example servers), drastically lowering the life-span of the unit. That is why for the enterprise environment (i.e., servers) the kind of SSD that must be used is the SLC. So SLC-based units are classified as "enterprise class", while MLC-based units are classified as "consumer class".

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Anatomy-of-SSD-Units/904/2

 

Still no issues to report, my 2 Mushkin Enhanced Callisto Deluxe MKNSSDCL240GB-DX 2.5" 240GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) drives are running great!

TH

 

Same for me, my Intel 320 is working fine for over 5 months now.

 

Running a pair of the 120GB version of those in RAID 0 for 10 months. Still breaking 525MB/s read and write.

 

My first SSD drive, a Kingston 128GB SV100S2/128G, recently started going wrong - it doesn't boot up first time after long periods turned off, it will though boot up after about 2 or 3 booting cycles. Sleep mode was a problem too - if left in sleep state for more than about 4 hours it would wake and boot up - but then freeze & bluescreen once the desktop showed. So I swapped it for a Dell drive I had laying around, and bingo, no problems. Booted everytime with no problems and same with sleep mode. To their credit, Kingston have been good, they've offered me a replacement, as they don't make my version now. BTW, Kingston techical support replied to my email within an hour of me sending - and same with the follow up I also sent. So props to them.

I did think this would be a drawn out drama with Kingston, and I jumped the gun a bit, I went and bought a Crucial M4 128GB drive - I've heard good thing's about them; as far reliability goes - that's all I am concerned with when it comes to SSD drives right now. At the moment SSD drives are noticeably / and somewhat comparatively as fast as eachother - and having gone back to a 7200rpm drive for a week I really did notice the speed difference between the two. There is significant snappiness 'feeling' advantage with an SSD. My first step into SSD's was worth it. The Kingston SSD is *going by the stats* one of the slowest performing but was definitely an enjoyable upgrade.

I can't really imagine going back to the platter and spindle as the main hard drive - maybe ever again. But at the moment they're my old faithful when it all goes wrong with the SSD

So far no problems with the Crucial M4. So I will put the Kingston drive on Ebay

 

Maybe I am missing something but why would it matter? A drive stores data. Why would the fact that is was encrypted make a difference? The drive itself wouldn't know the difference. The size if the files isn't going to increase by a noticeable amount. The encryption/decryption should be done by the CPU. Unless someone can give a reason I'm not aware of I don't see why it would do anything to shorten the life of the drive.