Sun Mar 25, 2012 5:23 pm
The
Intel 520 series SSD's are the most reliable bet, but also the most expensive. Intel only jumped into the Sandforce market recently (basically 1 year after everyone else with the 2281 controller which they have apparently spent doing extensive validation testing)
Here is a review which according to Intel, even current firmware fixes have missed some reliability related issues with sandforce controllers that only Intel has found and fixed. I'm not entirely convinced that there's much left to worry about with sandforce based SSD's (at least those companies that provide firmware updates..aka OCZ and Corsair that I know of) In that respect, I would recommend an
OCZ Agility 3 which costs $100 less and gets you roughly the same performance. I have a OCZ Vertex 3 and Corsair Force3 and have had NO ISSUES with either.
The samsung 830 is probably better than the Crucial m4 in my opinion, but that doesn't mean the m4 is a bad choice. You might want to go to TR's "storage" section and read a couple of their articles to get familiar with what different controllers and NAND types offer in terms of performance and price. As far as I'm concerned, for the majority of users, buy SSD's based on lowest price from a reputable company that is good at providing firmware updates. If you're paranoid about reliability, get an Intel 520 or Crucial m4. Samsung has a good reputation for reliability as well but the 830 series are still fairly new so some issues may arise that need to be fixed with firmware updates down the road. Sandforce's past reliability issues (BSOD's that have since been fixed) did not result in loss of data (to my understanding) like the Intel 320 series bug (which has also been fixed), but they did require the user to unplug the drive from power and plug it back in to restore the drive functionality.
Main: i5-3570K, ASRock Z77 Pro4-M, MSI RX480 8G, 500GB Crucial BX100, 2 TB Samsung EcoGreen F4, 16GB 1600MHz G.Skill @1.25V, EVGA 550-G2, Silverstone PS07B
HTPC: A8-5600K, MSI FM2-A75IA-E53, 4TB Seagate SSHD, 8GB 1866MHz G.Skill, Crosley D-25 Case Mod