Want a cheap SSD?

[synaesthesia]

Crucial Solid-State Drive Refurbished Promotion

 

72p per gig, including VAT.

So for a 64gb model thats a smidge over £46.

 

Limited time deal and they are refurbs but still - that shouldn't be missed IMO.

[Steve21]

Am I the only one who finds it ironic :D :D

 

 

(aka, Reliable + Durable, yet broke so needs refurb? )

 

Steve

[synaesthesia]

Heh, true Then again "refurb" can also mean "unwanted and returned"

[eejit]

They are notoriously unreliable, but some people find the advantages so great that they are willing to put up with replacing them once a year. I haven't gotten one yet, but thinking of it for the next family PC (stop the "Why does it take so long to boot up?" moans)

Just got to make sure you have a rock-solid backup in place before you make the jump.

[synaesthesia]

With the full warranty that shouldn't be an issue really. Haven't had any reliability problems as yet, mostly as I don't buy crap ones

However think twice if you have a P35 chipset core2duo system - you'll need a hacky bios to make them work properly.

Edited August 29, 2011 by synaesthesia

[eejit]

This is an interesting page regarding the quality of SSDs:

 

Coding Horror: The Hot/Crazy Solid State Drive Scale

[synaesthesia]

Interesting but with absolutely no information whatsoever. What the hell is he doing with them?

[SYNACK]

Interesting but with absolutely no information whatsoever. What the hell is he doing with them?

 

Developers, just enough knowlege to be really, really, really dangerous Its possibly the one environment harsher than a junior classroom.

[synaesthesia]

Surely not? Do you really want to give us nightmares?

[SYNACK]

Surely not? Do you really want to give us nightmares?

 

I was brought up to share, rude not to etc.

[synaesthesia]

I won't be able to sleep now with that in my mind!

 

In all honesty though, I really do wonder what he's doing, what he's running them on etc. For all we know, he could be using them on a SATA chipset that doesn't support them properly, XP without TRIM additions, old Linux kernels or doing a constant read/write cycle high enough to saturate his SATA bandwidth. Very scaremongery without any actual detail

[SYNACK]

I won't be able to sleep now with that in my mind!

 

In all honesty though, I really do wonder what he's doing, what he's running them on etc. For all we know, he could be using them on a SATA chipset that doesn't support them properly, XP without TRIM additions, old Linux kernels or doing a constant read/write cycle high enough to saturate his SATA bandwidth. Very scaremongery without any actual detail

 

Given standard developer patterns he probably has half a dozen database engines running at once on it, those along with the continuous running of test statments against them would probably be enough to cook off the write cycles all by itself let alone the compiles and OS overhead.

 

Along with a possibly misconfigured or plain old system (XP - which some devs run refusing to keep up with the times) such failures would be easily explainable.

 

SSDs still seem to have a higher failure rate than hard drives (well apart from WD ones ) so backups are especially important.

[CyberNerd]

I bought 20 OCZ SSD's a month ago. I've installed 6 and 2 have failed so far......

 

Having said that, I bought 10 a year ago and put them into Citrix servers running 24/7 and they've been fine.

[localzuk]

That's an extremely odd failure rate for SSDs from everything I've been reading.

 

However, I wouldn't be putting anything important on an SSD anyway - OS and apps only, documents on a NAS or local SATA array. If something needs high speed but is important, I'll have it backing up with something like Dropbox from that drive, so I always have an up to date backup.

 

But then again, I do that with normal drives too!

[synaesthesia]

Well exactly - backups are key! Only OS on mine home PC, profiles and data are on mech drives (good ol' Samsung F3's!)

[Arthur]

I bought a refurb'd 64GB C300 from Crucial for my sisters Atom netbook and it's still working fine 5 days later. Despite being very non-technical she noticed the difference immediately, not only in speed but the reduced heat too, so very pleased.

 

aka, Reliable + Durable, yet broke so needs refurb?

Even though they have a 30 day warranty, you should be covered by the Sale of Goods Act right? After all, they are stating the SSDs are reliable.

Edited August 29, 2011 by Arthur

[Arthur]

They are notoriously unreliable

For everyone concerned about reliability, take a look at this thread on the XtremeSystems forums...

 

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm

 

This screenshot is of a 64GB Crucial M4 which has had 418 terabytes written to it since the 16/05/2011 and it's still going. According to the manufacturers specs, it should have stopped working by now.

 

http://i.imgur.com/uLDFB.png

[CyberNerd]

the two failed OCZ drives that I had worked at first then just didn't get recognised by the bios.

[Arthur]

the two failed OCZ drives that I had worked at first then just didn't get recognised by the bios.

That's not surprising, since OCZ make some of the most unreliable SSDs you can buy.

 

As Synaesthesia said, don't buy crap SSDs. It's served me well so far as none of my SSDs have failed at home...

 

1 x 160GB Intel X25-M (my desktop PC)
1 x 40GB Intel X25-V (my Dad's desktop PC)
2 x 96GB Kingston SSDNow V+100 (one for my Mac mini and one in a ZFS NAS for the L2ARC)
1 x 64GB Crucial RealSSD C300 (netbook)

 

As work, we currently have five 80GB Intel 320 Series SSDs and these are still working perfectly too.

[Arthur]

I forgot to mention, if you buy one of these SSDs from Crucial and it has a 6 hand-written on the bottom (like mine did), update the firmware straight away to 0007. This improves reliability and fixes the stuttering/freezing issue quite a few people had.

 

Link: http://www.crucial.com/firmware/0007/C300_FW0007.zip

 

Firmware Changelog for v0006 to v0007:

Improved product reliability.

Resolved performance anomaly which resulted in brief, intermittent pause in drive response time for some users.

[synaesthesia]

the two failed OCZ drives that I had worked at first then just didn't get recognised by the bios.

 

Bet that was a P35/38 chipset mainboard

[CyberNerd]

Bet that was a P35/38 chipset mainboard

 

Mobile Intel PM45 Express, but it's an electronic failure on the drive

[synaesthesia]

Same thing (except your failure was something else) - the ICH9R/ICH9/ICH9M raid/sata controller can't run SSDs properly if at all often resulting in drives disappearing from BIOS or appearing to fail otherwise

[SYNACK]

Same thing (except your failure was something else) - the ICH9R/ICH9/ICH9M raid/sata controller can't run SSDs properly if at all often resulting in drives disappearing from BIOS or appearing to fail otherwise

 

Intel strikes again, you'd think it was long division ( Chip Error Continuing To Dog Officials at Intel - NYTimes.com )

[synaesthesia]

lol, I don't remember that