My estimate included having BT downloading to the C drive.

At 5 Mbps, you could potentially download 50 GB a day. SSDs are usually rated for 3,000 p/e cycles (or writes). So for a 64GB SSD, I assume you consume 1 p/e cycle per day (writing 50GB of downloads), which gives you 8.2 years. But most SSDs typically last for much longer than their rated p/e cycles and most users can't actually use that kind of performance, so hitting past 10 years isn't that much of a stretch. Satisfied now?

Most SSDs have only 3 years warranty. But prices are also dropping quite rapidly, so they should be a lot more affordable in three to five years time.

As a gamer, SSDs are only useful in installing games, loading games and loading maps.

As a FRAPs user, it would be useful for writing the huge video files to the drive.

But both the 520 and 320 prices are a bit expensive for my taste as there are cheaper options. Like Intel's 330 120GB which goes at RM449 at most retail places. You should be able to find better offers through the online traders that we have here as well.

Do you have HDDs? Were they sleeping before you shut down? Did the performance profile forced the HDDs to stay awake despite being idle for hours? If your answer was yes to all, your shut down was previously delayed by Windows starting up the sleeping HDDs before it can shut down the system.

I have had five HDDs that needed to be woken up, serially, before the computer could shutdown and it take much less than five minutes. Maybe there was another reason or problem. Checking your HDDs SMART statuses might reveal a clue, or not.

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Added on May 24, 2012, 9:25 pmThe older smaller capacity and slower SSDs have better P/E cycle counts, some reaching as high as 5,000. The newer, larger capacity, cheaper and faster SSDs are much more fragile, and they keep on getting more fragile for every new generation. Choose your poison.

To be honest, normal users don't need to worry about the write lifespan. Just pick the SSD that you are comfortable with. I would recommend any cheap, reliable and large capacity SSD that fits the budget to anyone. Please don't be tempted by the high performance SSDs because even the cheap budget SSDs are still extremely fast when compared to HDDs. It is difficult to tell if you have a performance SSD or a budget SSD by feel alone, unless you benchmark it.

This post has been edited by everling: May 24 2012, 09:27 PM

Either Intel's 330 or OCZ's Agility will do. There is less risk with Intel, but if OCZ's Agility behaves, it may save you a little.

This post has been edited by everling: May 25 2012, 02:39 PM

There is a pro and a con to this situation.

The huge pro is that RM290 price for the 120GB. For current 120GB SSDs, prices start at RM420. Anything cheaper than RM400 is solid 60GB SSD territory.

The SATA 3.0 Gbps performance is not a real issue. You will still feel that the SSD is very fast, and you'll be surprised to feel that SATA 6.0 Gbps SSDs are not that much faster.

The con here is that this model may have compatibility issues. If you are lucky, which is a good chance, than you will be very happy. If you are not lucky, you will need to try to update the firmware and hope it fixed the problem or find another SSD. If you want to try this SSD, I recommend making sure that you have the option to change to another SSD without much extra cost.

Other than incompatibility problems isolated to SandForce-based SSDs (which the OCZ model you are looking at is one), it is hard to say. There was no report on the exact cause of the incompatibilities. Nor was there a report that all the SandForce incompatibility problems with the old SSDs have been settled. I'd say your chances is pretty good, but I'd also only buy it if I have a way out if the SSD has compatibility problems.

You mean something more current? You're then looking at RM400++ for a 120GB SSD.

Most SSDs should be fine now, including modern SandForce-based SSDs, but there is a standing recommendation to go either Crucial M4 or Intel. For the Crucial M4, you'll need to buy via some of the traders here as they aren't sold in retail stores. Intel's 330 Series are also SandForce-based SSDs, but they have been validated quite thoroughly by Intel. I have even bought a 330 myself and it worked fine in a variety of machines.

Just making sure as you didn't explicitly answered the question. Did you made sure that your SSD was already in AHCI mode and then installed Windows 7?

Please don't worry about its write lifespan. You need to write 128GB of data everyday in order to wear out its write lifespan in 8 years time. Isn't that already long enough?

Which models were these SSDs?

Those articles are quite obsoleted now. You won't find those items in the retail market now as they're EOLed a while ago. And you have to be careful about what you hear from other people. They may simply be repeating year old news that may be quite untrue now.

I am currently using a budget-class Kingston SSD bought in late 2009 that will see its third birthday by the end of this year and it is still going strong. I have heavily used it, including BT downloads. Barring external interference, I am fairly sure that it will live for another few more years.

Intel has apparently solved their SandForce-controller problems via their own custom firmware. While the other manufacturers using SandForce should have received most of the patches by now via SandForce, I do not know for sure. In any case, there has been little noise about SandForce SSDs failing or BSODing for many months now.

This post has been edited by everling: May 27 2012, 09:07 PM

All my applications are installed on the SSD, but most games are in a HDD. When I download via BT, I save them to my SSD first and then move the completed downloads to their final locations in the HDDs.

The reason I do this is because my games rarely improve when installed to my SSD. And also so that my HDDs aren't abused by doing a lot of random writes. HDDs are fragile, SSDs are not. At least in my experience.

More like 16x7 now, sorry to disappoint.

For those chasing performance SSDs to replace their old SSDs, will you please report if you can feel the performance difference? Does it compare to the first time you used an SSD?

It's not a recall. It's a returns program for owners that wants to use the AES-256 encryption feature and not AES-128.

The funny thing is that AES-256 is actually weaker than AES-128 at the moment due to a weakness discovered in 2009. Currently, AES-256's strength is 2^99.5 vs AES-128's 2^126.1. So unless you are required to use AES-256, using AES-128 will give you better security for now. Then again, even at 2^99.5 operations, it will still take billions of years of computing to crack using today's hardware.

If you don't care for AES-256 or use software-based FDE, you can keep using your 520.

If you want to have 128GB of space, okay. If you want to have extra speed, it's probably not worth the trouble and you're likely to be bottlenecked by your CPU.

Yes, a SATA 6Gb/s SSD will run at 3Gb/s if connected to a SATA 3Gb/s port.

I'd recommend a 120GB SSD, so that you may use it for a larger variety of purposes and don't feel overly restricted. The pricing is at about RM450. And don't be afraid to use your SSD rougher than you would a HDD. Despite having a limited write lifespan, the average user would probably hit that limit after ten years of use; the SSD is likely to die or get obsoleted for other reasons.

Just moving up from a HDD to an SSD will give you most of the SSD experience. Upgrading from SATA 3Gb/s to 6Gb/s will not feel that much of a difference, despite the benchmarks showing a big performance upgrade.

Let's take Shogun 2 for example, on my Phenom II X3, it takes forever to start up no matter whether it is located on either my HDD or SSD and one or sometimes two CPU cores are maxed out during the long startup wait.

I've also done timing tests on Medieval 2: Total War which has the same loading time on both SSD and HDD, and according to Process Explorer (iirc) only loaded about 90MB from the SSD/HDD to get me to the loading screen.

And the same with Neverwinter Nights, which can create hundreds or even thousands of tiny little files when loading save games, which should be just perfect for my SSD somehow doesn't seriously improve save game load times when placed on my SSD.

In short, there is a fair chance to be bottlenecked by the CPU. Which is why I don't bother to install my games on my SSD, I just put them all on my HDD. And yes, I am aware that there are SSD game load time benchmarks which does show some improvement, but I think that's more because they are less CPU-bottlenecked than I am.

I don't think that will ever happen. Aren't the M4s already getting rather long in the tooth? They may get replaced by a successor.

The online trader CyntrixTech says that they don't do grey market products, so you should be able to RMA the SSDs to a local distributor. You should ask CyntrixTech if you do want to buy these SSDs.

Just how old is your OS install and have you installed a lot of applications to it?

While I would prefer the 330, it would be for the reliability and not performance. Performance specs aren't everything for SSDs, because their primary killer feature is in the low access times, and access times are about the same for all SSDs.

And given the price tag of RM195, I guess the 330 was more expensive than he can accept.

This post has been edited by everling: Jun 14 2012, 02:24 PM