Our consumer storage test bench is based on Intel's Z77 Platform Controller Hub paired with an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU. Intel's 6- and 7-series chipsets are virtually identical from a storage perspective. We're standardizing on older RST 10.6.1002 drivers for the foreseeable future.

Changes in RST's driver packages occasionally result in subtle performance changes. They can also lead to some truly profound variance in scores and results as well, depending on the driver revision. Some versions flush writes more or less frequently. Others work better in RAID situations. In fact, builds 11.2 and newer support TRIM in RAID as well. Regardless, results obtained with one revision may or may not be comparable to results obtained with another, so sticking with one version across all testing is mandatory.
| Test Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core i5-2400 (Sandy Bridge), 32 nm, 3.1 GHz, LGA 1155, 6 MB Shared L3, Turbo Boost Enabled |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte G1.Sniper M3 |
| Memory | G.Skill Ripjaws 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3-1866 @ DDR3-1333, 1.5 V |
| System Drive | Kingston HyperX 3K 240 GB, Firmware 5.02 |
| Drives Under Test | Crucial M500 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02 |
| Crucial M500 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02 | |
| Crucial M500 480 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02 | |
| Crucial M500 960 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02 | |
| Comparison Drives | Samsung 840 EVO 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q |
| Samsung 840 EVO 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q | |
| Samsung 840 EVO 480 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q | |
| Samsung 840 EVO 1 TB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q | |
| SanDisk Ultra Plus 64 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: X211200 | |
| SanDisk Ultra Plus 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware X211200 | |
| SanDisk Ultra Plus 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware X211200 | |
| Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware DXM04B0Q | |
| Samsung 840 Pro 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware DXM04B0Q | |
| SanDisk Extreme II 120 GB, Firmware: R1311 | |
| SanDisk Extreme II 240 GB, Firmware: R1311 | |
| SanDisk Extreme II 480 GB, Firmware: R1311 | |
| Seagate 600 SSD 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: B660 | |
| Intel SSD 525 30 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi | |
| Intel SSD 525 60 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi | |
| Intel SSD 525 120 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi | |
| Intel SSD 525 180 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi | |
| Intel SSD 525 240 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi | |
| Intel SSD 335 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 335s | |
| Intel SSD 510 250 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: PWG2 | |
| OCZ Vertex 3.20 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.25 | |
| OCZ Vector 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.0 | |
| Samsung 830 512 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: CXMO3B1Q | |
| Crucial m4 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 000F | |
| Plextor M5 Pro 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 1.02 | |
| Corsair Neutron GTX 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: M206 | |
| Graphics | MSI Cyclone GTX 460 1 GB |
| Power Supply | Seasonic X-650, 650 W 80 PLUS Gold |
| Chassis | Lian Li Pitstop |
| RAID | LSI 9266-8i PCIe x8, FastPath and CacheCade AFK |
| System Software and Drivers | |
| Operating System | Windows 7 x64 Ultimate |
| DirectX | DirectX 11 |
| Drivers | Graphics: Nvidia 314.07 RST: 10.6.1002 IMEI: 7.1.21.1124 |
| Benchmarks | |
|---|---|
| Tom's Hardware Storage Bench v1.0 | Trace-Based |
| Iometer 1.1.0 | # Workers = 1, 4 KB Random: LBA=16 GB, varying QDs, 128 KB Sequential, 8 GB LBA Precondition, Exponential QD Scaling |
| PCMark 7 | Secondary Storage Suite |
| PCM Vantage | Storage Suite |
- Crucial's New m4 (Plus 496) Gets Reviewed
- Inside Of Crucial's M500 SSD
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Results: 128 KB Sequential Reads
- Results: 128 KB Sequential Write
- Results: 4 KB Random Reads
- Results: 4 KB Random Writes
- Results: Tom's Storage Bench v1.0
- Results: Tom's Storage Bench, Continued
- Results: PCMark 7 And PCMark Vantage
- Results: File Copy
- Results: Power Consumption
- Head To Head: Crucial's M500s Vs. Samsung's 840 EVOs
- We Like The High-Capacity Crucial M500 SSDs Best...
The SSD 840 is rated for 1000 P/E cycles, though it's been seen doing more like ~3000. At 10GB/day, a 240GB would last for 24,000 days, or about 766 years, and that's using the 1K figure.
You're free to waste money if you want, but SLC now has little place outside write-heavy DB storage.
EDIT: Screwed up by an order of magnitude.
You are totally correct! You win a gold star, because I didn't even notice. Thanks for catching it, and it should be fixed now.
Regards,
Christopher Ryan
Not only are consumer workloads completely gentle on SSDs, but modern controllers are super awesome at expanding NAND longevity. I was able to burn through 3000+ PE cycles on the Samsung 840 last year, and it only is rated at 1,000 PE cycles or so. You'd have to put almost 1 TB a day on a 120 GB Samsung 840 TLC to kill it in a year, assuming it didn't die from something else first.
Regards,
Christopher Ryan
You may be thinking of the controller failures some of the Sandforce drives had, which are completely unrelated to the type of NAND used.
I would like to see, can TH use SSD put this 10GB/day and see for how long it will work.
After this I read this article, I think that Crucial's M500 hit the jackpot. Will see Samsung's response. And that's very good for end consumer.
Show me a report with a reasonable sample size (more than a couple of dozen drives) that says they have >50% annual failures.
A couple of years ago Tom's posted this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html
The majority of failures were firmware-caused by early Sandforce drives. That's gone now.
EDIT: Missed your post. First off, that's a perfect example of self-selection. Secondly, those who buy multiple SSDs will appear to have n times the actual failure rate, because if any fail they all appear to fail. Thirdly, that has nothing to do with whether or not it is a 1bpc or 3 bpc SSD - that's what you started off with.
Sounds a bit like a sore loser argument, unfortunately.
SSDs aren't perfect, but they generally do live long enough to not be a problem. Most of the failures have been overcome by now too.
Just realised there's an error in my original post - off by a factor of ten. Should have been 66 years.
Also, SLC based SSD-s are usually "enterprise", so they are designed for reliability and not performance, and they don't use some bollocks, overclocked to the point of failure, controllers. And have better optimised firmware...
Tell that to all the people on this forum still running intel X-25M that launched all the way back in 2008 and my Samsung 830 that's been working just fine for over a year.......
See what you're paying attention too is the loudest group of ssd owners. The owners that have failed ssd's.
See it's the classic "if someone has a problem, there going to be the one that you hear and the quiet group, isn't having the problem" issue.
Those that dont have issues (such as myself) dont mention about our ssds and is probably complaining about something else that has failed.
Those don't seem like opinions to me. It's customary to include some form of leeway in the sentence, like 'IMHO', 'often', or 'I've heard' etc.
Assuming the system has more than enough RAM to avoid needing any significant amount of swapping. If someone with 4GB RAM uses a 16GB swapfile to avoid upgrading to the 8-16GB RAM he really should have, he could end up writing over 1GB/minute.
I have ended up over-crowding my RAM many times in the past and it has a tendency to make my computers practically unusable when using mechanical HDDs at which point I had to spread my programs and swapfile across multiple HDDs to reduce the IO load on individual drives. I imagine this would burn through SSDs fairly quickly.
Also, SLC based SSD-s are usually "enterprise", so they are designed for reliability and not performance, and they don't use some bollocks, overclocked to the point of failure, controllers. And have better optimised firmware...
Anecdotal evidence is pretty useless. People with very good or very bad experiences tend to write reviews. People generally don't write reviews for random pieces of hardware that just work as expected. Provide citations with statistics to support your statements if you want anyone to take them seriously.
I will not be replying to this topic any more. All I wanted to do is say my opinion, but there had to be some smartass telling me that I don't have the right to do it. Noooo, I have to source it. This is my oppinion, get over it.
You are entitled to your opinion but you are making bold statements without any facts. A lot of people use forums like these to research products they are thinking about buying and you are spreading misinformation about SSD's without and evidence for your statements. I personally have 4 computers with SSD's in them that are over 2 years old and I haven't had a single issue or failure. It really pisses me off when people start spreading inaccurate statements that may turn away a potential user of a SSD. Out of all the PC upgrades I have done in the past 12 years the SSD has been the best most noticeable improvement I have done.
Just to stick an oar into the reliability issue, my Samsung 830 has run reliably for over two years now. The only SSDs I had fail in use were a couple of Sandforce drives, but their replacements have thus far been reliable. I think InvalidError has a good point about RAM though; I tend to use at least 8GB, which probably cuts down swapping quite a bit. I also prefer to close programs completely rather than have a lot of windows open, which would also reduce swapping. With a SSD, they re-open pretty quickly anyway.
I will not be replying to this topic any more. All I wanted to do is say my opinion, but there had to be some smartass telling me that I don't have the right to do it. Noooo, I have to source it. This is my oppinion, get over it.
LOL, when you come onto an article about SSD's and say nonsense like you did, you have to expect to get hate buddy. MLC/TLC is very viable and lasts much longer than a year kid, some drives do fail, and if they do you get your replacement. Other peoples drives are not lemons and last a normal lifetime, common sense bro.
Oh, I highly recommend getting the drive migration kit from Crucial for ~$20. It makes like much easier. It's a USB 3.0 SATA drive connector for your M500. Then just boot the supplied CD and run it in auto mode to copy over your drive exactly and make any sizing adjustments needed to the partitions to get it to fit. It works very nicely.