lol! i have enough sata ssds already. well, on another thought, ok lah i will get 1x to match my m5m for raid in g55 hahaha!

plextor use good nand and controller. unless it's a lemon, which you should just do rma right away, they are super reliable i must say.

it's a good one. please check posts at the previous page. you might be able to get a rebadge m5pro for a good price.

i have 5x plextor retail drives and 1x oem. all good.

Yes i mean liteon ssd. Get 256gb if possible. (More space, more speed, compared to 128gb)

Sorry i don't have the answer to stock availability. You can call them up for more info. The website of c-zone is compu-zone.com. You can check out their latest price list also.

now we are talking this is a good speed for 2x sata raid0. jellynye :/

yes this is why we never say old technologies are old. it just depends on how we use and make wonders with them

imagine 4x sata ports. MYR 1.6k, 2GB/s, 1tb space. nice right? lol!

for 240gb-256gb capacity, liteon s900 and transcend ssd370 are good buys now. actually if you checked the tbw of transcend ssd370 256gb, it has a 280tb of endurance rating. (samsung 850 pro has a 10-year warranty, but the endurance rating is just 150tb regardless of capacity)

for relatively better and proven durability, the choices are actually pretty much narrowed down to performance consumer drives. the tested ones are samsung 840 pro and kingston hyperx 3k. another option might be intel 730.

the endurance rating by manufacturer for crucial mx100 is 72tb. about the bolded part, they are all estimates by manufacturers, not reviewers. (maybe it's hard and not practical to establish one. it takes time to do all these endurance testings. also, by the time the results are out, new models already come out, new die, new tech and all, and the ones in the tests are long phased out) however imo this information is useful because it's the guarantee by manufacturers themselves, which is tied to warranty.

i think it's better to dig deeper for details of nand flash memory if you wanna know more. such information should be available somewhere. however, longevity is linked directly to usage. all we know is that for general use, it will last for quite some years (for 128gb with proper OP and optimizations, 7 years plus?).

that's not considered a damage if you really need that much of performance. the damage from m.2 options is worse lol

in terms of ssd, plextor and liteon share the same technology. of course the final products are usually different because of retail (plextor mainly) and oem (liteon) demands.

they are not well known for several reasons. one is the lack of general awareness that they are ssd vendors (like you, many still think that they are only ODD vendors). another one is related to the retail market, in which consumers get their stuff. most of the time, consumers only know performance numbers. with all marketing materials focusing on speed only, everything good about these two brands are overshadowed by others that show better numbers. they are not among the fastest. well, no one cares about the decision of plextor and liteon to use only good-quality nand flash and controller to achieve long-term reliability of their drives.

about quality, imo they are pretty reliable under proper use. liteon ssds are often found in high-end workstation pc and laptops. (i guess these oem pc makers do take reliability of components inside their products seriously, mainly to avoid excessive warranty claims)

no lah bro hehe.. ssd is still new. a lot of things can be learned from its development processes (which is interesting to me).

dropped about half i think (mainstream drives). Edit: sorry facts from TristanX are better. It's not by half after all lol!

This post has been edited by horns: Feb 12 2015, 05:58 PM

well technically nothing is hitting the wall, yet. it's said that nand flash takes about 85% of the total costs of ssd production. the current practice is to cut costs via die shrinking. this part will hit the wall sooner because the smaller it goes the error rates will get higher. however, in terms of capacity, there is still v-nand (which can be applied to mlc and tlc). that, we need volume to bring the manufacturing costs down.

another way to bring down the costs is via tlc nand flash. i know there are many questionable parts about tlc that need answers, especially about its endurance and reliability. however i think time will tell. as for endurance, previously i read about a way to boost endurance and speed in nand flash. if this technology can apply to tlc nand flash, i think tlc might be the next best thing to replace mlc in consumer space, at much cheaper costs.

i will check my wallet first (if i wanna go for performance i will do this part first); then i set my expectations about its performance (usually based on what i wanna do with it). i will get as much tech details as possible from review sites and vendors, especially about type of nand flash (for now, preferably mlc), controller, then type and capacity of ram, connection type (sata or pcie; ahci or nvme), speed (seq. r/w, iops), and tbw/dwpd. the more practical part is the speeds after the drive is in steady state, not from fresh drives, but this is usually unavailable until you use the drive with your usage.

as of now, i will pick at least 240-256gb range because at this range and above, the performance is usually optimal for that particular model. (larger drives are not always the fastest. some are relatively slower at higher capacity drives)

other than that, it's the same as TristanX, from reputable brands, and fast enough for me.

however the simplest way is still grab a number of affordable and decent ones and make a raid0

if you wanna save 6% of additional tax and our weak currency, do it asap.

for the second part of the question, no idea.

Ssd performance will degrade over time, especially the used capacity is over 50%. Over provisioning and sufficient time for garbage collection can help but eventually you will need to do a secure erase once in a while to get back the speed.

no. all ssds have this because this is about how nand flash works.

when a file is deleted, the process doesn't delete all the file data. there will be partially filled blocks that are not cleaned. note that the trim command only ask ssd to remove file data when it's deleted, but it doesn't force the cleanup operation to these partially filled blocks. to mitigate the issue, garbage collection is used to do this, by looking for partially filled blocks in the ssd, and clearing them to make free space. over provisioning is also important i this case to prevent performance degradation, by giving free space to the controller to do gc.

usually secure erase will reset everything to the factory state. (well, close to i should say)

oh that's bad. can you share with us your usage? also, did you do op? how many % of the total space for op if you have done that? did you do other ssd optimizations? did you use ram disk or ram cache? i wonder why no one has expressed this short-life problem before. i am using 2x plextor m5pro xtreme for 2 years plus, 512gb, latest firmware, 15% op. no issues. i suspect system setup and usage contribute to the problem, but you will never know.

of your 3 choices, intel 530 is a good buy because of its longer warranty period. crucial m550 is newer.

about sandforce controller, yeah there were hiccups initially but with time most if not all of the bugs were remedied. those were non-intel drives usually. you should know that intel's implementations of sandforce controller were different from others, with many optimizations. so far we seldom hear anything bad about it.

to me crucial and plextor drives are reliable. they are not fast, but decent enough for my usage.

over provisioning is just setting an unallocated free space at the end of the ssd. you can use the disk management tool to do that. samsung recommends 10% with its magician software. this is subject to personal preference.

it's better to apply the fix (consider it as a firmware upgrade). i don't have any issues with it after the fix also.

sorry i shouldn't refer your case as 'short-life', i should say 'speed-drop'. op is over provisioning, putting certain amount of unallocated free space at the end of your ssd. if you relocated your temp folders and web cache to it, this method saves a lot of writes to the ssd. yes it doesn't affect ssd's read speed.

based on this review (http://www.anandtech.com/print/6090/plextor-m5s-256gb-review), the gc part should be fine for m5s. by the way your ssd is actually still very healthy based on the total writes (if compared to tbw of 72tb). one last thing, did you swap sata port before? it looks like a sata 2 speed.

yeah it's sata ii speed. one more thing to check is the sata cable.

i think with that health your drive should be fine and can last for quite some times, with decent performance. (because in steady state, it should be slightly higher than 300MB/s) this is why i think something is wrong somewhere else.

the easier way to verify is to use another computer with different ports and cables.

i think he's using the right one. because the speed drop was said to only occur recently.

this is more like it (actually it's like factory state. not bad for a 2-year-old drive imo) yeah for trouble shooting, we always have to check everything related. in your case, this includes sata port and the cables. it's not uncommon for them to fail.

maybe it's not about the sata port or cable. previously we didn't do a complete power recycling (i.e. pull the ssd off from its sata cable and system, leave it alone for some times, and then put it back in) i think the older crucial m4 needed this step also when you do secure erase or something like that on it.


This post has been edited by horns: Feb 16 2015, 05:29 PM

for samsung 840 evo users, another fix is coming up.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2887255/sam...0-evo-ssds.html