Indilinx - 1 year later

So now that the Indilinx based SSDs have been out for about a year, our courageous early adopters have doubtlessly had some experience using them. Now, as for reliability - I set up a poll to see what they are like.

 

So far, so good with my OCZ Vertex 120GB and OCZ Agility 120GB.

There are faster drives out there based off of the SandForce controllers, which are certainly tempting. But once you have a drive that is "fast enough", you quickly hit the point of diminishing returns. So going beyond Indilinx doesn't really make sense, if that is what you already own.

 

I have a Corsair Nova128 and it has been humming along for about 6 months. My only bottleneck is the intel 55. And I am not sure I can even notice that. It is fast, eveything loads fast and it still seems like brand new to me.

 

Thanks for the replies

I just picked up a Vertex 120GB for $159 today ($189 - $30 rebate) ... hope it'll meet expectations

 

My 120GB Vertex1 died on me during a FINAL EXAM, hours before it was due.

RMA'd that, got another one, then sold it. Trying my luck with sandforce now.

 

, that's pretty bad. Did you run lots of benchmarks on it? Or just regular use?

 

We had a 30GB Vertex in an old D620 at my workplace... the machine was used for maybe 20 to 40 hours a week, and the drive kicked the bucket after a paltry three months. OCZ wouldn't let us RMA because we bought it from eBay, and not an "authorized distributor".

Nothing against Indilinx, but OCZ... tsk tsk.

 

I have 5 OCZ vertex drives. (2-120GB, 2-60GB, 1-30GB). One of the 120GBers died unexpectedly just two weeks ago after a year and 3 months of regular normal use and with 88% drive life remaining.

RMA'd it and just got a new one from OCZ. Good thing I Acronis weekly and had a back up harddrive to use while I waited for 2 weeks for the new one. All I had to do was to image the new OCZ drive with the old one's image and was back up and running in minutes.

But OCZ's trouble ticket RMA is sort of cumbersome. I'm old school and like a simple phone call to get an RMA on the spot so little time is wasted.

 

Really. how come it was down to 88% drive life? Do you think that is an accurate measurement?

 

I had a 120GB Vertex that was down to 79% after just a few months of use.

 

The Intel 55 bug can make installation times twice as long...

 

So does that mean that once I start using the drive it's on a countdown clock with only maybe two or three years of life? That doesn't sound so good...

 

The limited write lifetime of NAND memory has been blown way out of proportion.

Yes, there is a limited number of writes on the memory. And yes, after that time, your drive will revert to a read-only mode. And if you take the alarmist point of view, which tends to show contrived worst-cased scenarios to prove a point, then yes, your drive could hypothetically stop working after 2-3 years.

But when you look at how you actually use a drive in the real-world, you start to develop a more realistic point of view. In my estimate, an SSD should last me at least 5 years, if not more. I am so confident that SSD's are this reliable, that I spent almost $1000 on 3 SSD drives over the past year. I really think that this "limited write cycle" issue of SSD's is overblown. In all likelihood, you will replace any SSD you buy for performance or capacity reasons long before it dies because the NAND memory gets worn out.

 

Hmm, that's some good information. There has been talk over at the OCZ forums that the Win7 is not kind to SSDs (frequent small file writes which might only be a few bytes but contributes greatly to wear and tear, mostly things like temporary files and registry). Do you guys think that that has any merit?

 

Not at all, in fact I'd say Win7 is better for SSDs than older OSes such as XP.

 

I think there is half merit. It is true that OSes in general (not specifically Win7) tend to result in frequent small file writes that can contribute greatly to wear and tear, but I think that has been mostly accounted for now in most newer drives with TRIM and garbage collection, and is already considered in the expected lifetime of the drives. The biggest limitation we have right now is the fact that consumer SSDs just haven't been around long enough in the real world for true studies on how well they stand up over time. Laboratory tests can only tell us so much.

 

Yeah, you're right about that. I have been thinking - what if I move all these temporary files and all these things to a separate drive, like for example right on an SD card that I permanently leave in my card reader? It would sit flush with the card reader and I think that could be a working solution. Wondering whether that will significantly slow down the performance, though? Hmm...

 

poll creators need to start including a n/a option for those of use who can't answer. I want to see the results of the poll without corrupting the data.

 

you can click view poll results

 

Personally, I don't think it's worth the trouble. To be fair, though, I don't own a SSD myself.

 

By the way, I think performance degradation is more related to the quality of NAND used instead of the controller.

The OCZ Vertex uses better quality NAND then the OCZ Onyx for example.