The SandForce Roundup: Corsair, Kingston, Patriot, OCZ, OWC & MemoRight SSDs Compared
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 11, 2011 12:01 AM ESTFinal Words
There really shouldn't be any surprises here. Given the same controller, the same NAND and the same firmware there's no difference between SandForce SSDs. They may look different and they may be priced differently, but they are effectively the same. So how do you pick between otherwise identical drives?
Firmware availability is an important feature. OCZ's exclusive arrangement with SandForce still gives it the advantage here. No competing SandForce drive gets firmware updates as quickly as OCZ owners. That's not always a good thing however. In the interest of pushing out fixes and improvements as quickly as possible you don't just get good firmware updates, sometimes you get updates that are best skipped. If you're the type of user that wants the latest updates as quickly as possible, OCZ is your only option.
For everyone else it looks like all of the competing drives are at least running with fairly up to date firmware revisions (either the absolute latest or one revision older than the latest). However it's unclear what the update cadence will be like going forward for these guys. The hope is that you won't need to update the firmware on your drive after you buy it, but it's clear at this point that there's still some room for compatibility improvements in the latest SandForce firmware.
The BSOD issue continues to be a significant blemish on SandForce's trackrecord. I don't have nearly enough systems deployed with SF-2281 hardware to really make any accurate statements of how widespread the issue is, but even if it is limited - it's a problem that should not exist. SandForce based drives continue to offer the best performance out of anything on the market today, not just in peak performance but in performance over time. For systems without TRIM support (e.g. Macs without the TRIM enabler) the hallmark SandForce resiliency is even more important. Unfortunately the unresolved BSOD issue makes all of these drives a risk if you don't know for sure that your system won't be affected.
The safest route without sacrificing significant performance continues to be Intel's SSD 510.
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V3ctorPT - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
Exactly what I think, I have an X25-M 160Gb and that thing is still working flawlessly with the advertised speeds, every week he gets the Intel Optimizer and it's good...Even my Gskill Falcon 1 64Gb is doing great, no BSOD's, no unexpected problems, the only "bad" thing that I saw was in SSD Life Free, when it say's my SSD is at 80% of NAND wear n' tear, my Intel is at 100%.
CrystalDisk Info confirms those conditions (that SSD Life reports), Anand, do you think these "tools" are trust worthy? Or they're some sort of scam?
SjarbaDarba - Sunday, August 14, 2011 - link
Where I work - we have had 265 Vertex II drives come back since June 2010.That's one every day or two since for our 1 store, hardly reliable tech.
Ikefu - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
"a 64Gb 25nm NAND die will set you back somewhere from $10 - $20. If we assume the best case scenario that's $160 for the NAND alone"I think you meant to say an 8Gb Nand die will set you back $10-$20. Not 64Gb
Yay math typos. Those are always hard to catch.
bobbozzo - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
No, 64Gb = 8GBNote the capitalization/case.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
We're using gigaBITs (little b), not gigaBYTEs (big B).64Gb x 16 modules / 8 bits-to-bites = 128GBytes.
Ikefu - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
Ah Capitalization for the loss, I see my error now. Thank you =)Later in the article they refer to 8GB so the switch from Gigabits to Gigabytes through me.
philosofool - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
I made the same mistake at first.Can I request that, in the future, we write either in terms of bytes or bits for the same type of part? There's no need to switch from bits to bytes when talking about storage capacity and you just confuse a reader or two when you do.
nbrenner - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
I understand the GB vs Gb argument, but even if it takes 8 modules to make up 64Gb it was stated that a 64Gb die would set you back $10-$20, so saying a 128Gb drive would cost $160 didn't make any sense until 3 paragraphs later when it said the largest die you could get is 8GB.I think most of us read that if 64Gb is $10-$20, then why in the world would it cost $160 to get to 128Gb?
Death666Angel - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
Unless he edited it, it clearly states "128GB". I think the b=bit and B=byte is quite clear, though I would not complain if they stick with one thing and not change it in between. :-)Mathieu Bourgie - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
Once again, a fantastic article from you Anand on SSDs.I couldn't agree more on the state of consumer SSDs and their reliability (or lack of...).
The problem as you mentioned is the small margins that manufacturers are getting (if they are actually manufacturing it...), which results in less QA than required and products that launch with too many bugs. The issue is, this won't go away, because many customers do want the price per GB to go down before they'll buy. Probably waiting for that psychological $1 per GB, that same 1$ per GB that HDDs reached many years ago.
With prices per GiB (actual capacity in Windows) dropping below $1.50, reliability is one of the last barrier for SSDs to actually become mainstream. Most power users now have one or are considering one, but SSDs are still very rare in most desktops/laptops sold by HP, Dell and the like. Sometimes they will be offered as an option (with additional cost), but rarely as a standard drive (only a handful or two of exceptions come to mind for laptops).
I can only hope that the reliability situation improves, because I do wish to see a major computing breakthrough, that is for SSDs to replace HDDs entirely one day. As you said years ago in an early SSD article, once you had a SSD, you can't go without one.
My desktop used to have two Samsung F3 1TB in RAID 0. Switching to it from my laptop (which had an Intel 120GB X25-M G2) was almost painful. Being accustomed to the speed of the SSD, the HDDs felt awfully slow. And I'm talking about two top of the line (besides raptors) HDDs in RAID 0 here, not a five year old IDE HDD here.
It's always a pleasure to read your articles Anand, keep up the outstanding work!