Kingston SSDs :(

I experienced my third SSD failure today. All three drives have been Kingston brand.

A 64gb (warranty replaced), another 64gb (its replacement, also failed), and now a 256gb. All failed in exactly the same way, locking up the system with the hard drive constantly on. Sometimes it will recover, only to do it again a few minutes later.

All my other drives (Intel, PNY, Crucial, OCZ, and SanDisk) have been flawless. Yes, even the 2 Indilinx-based OCZ drives I have owned.

 

If you've had bad luck with the brand, maybe you should stop buying them. I've had two Kingston SSDs in my R60e - a 16GB and 80GB. They've given me no trouble.

 

Would be interesting to know which exact Kingston models...

 

They were all either V100 or V+100. 2 64gb and 1 256gb.

Sent from my Tricorder using Tapatalk

 

Good to know. Thanks! I think I have a V100 64GB kicking around somewhere. Used to be in a netbook but I sold it (netbook) with the original HDD and kept the SSD.

 

Wow. That's tough to swallow. I've got a Kingston in my Alienware M17x (Kingston HyperX 240GB). Never given me a day's trouble. But I do remember when I was shopping SSDs a year ago, I was steered away from the V100's and the OCZ Vertex 3's. The peeps on Newegg said they kept having issues with their controllers. Go figure.

 

If you were (understandably) staying away from the Vertex 3 because of controller issues, what made you pick the HyperX instead? The 2 drives would be identical if not for the branding - both use the SF-2281 controller that people were having issues with alongside 25nm synchronous IMFT NAND.

 

I know. That's why I said "Go Figure". I don't understand how the sandforce controller in one model can have so many issues, but another model with the exact same sandforce controller doesn't. I even came here and asked. Never got an answer though. Main reason I picked the HyperX is because Dell had a deal for the Kingston SSDs. It was normally priced at $400 and they had it for $300 + I had an giftcard so I think I paid ~$230 for a 240GB SSD. That's about the same as I would have got it at Newegg for, so I wasn't too concerned about Dell's price extortion. In hind sight, I probably could have made a more well researched decision, but I am still very happy with the performance of my SSD.

 

DOH! I have two of these drives.

Kingston SNVP325-S2/64GB which is an SSDNow V+ with Toshiba T6UG1XBG controller.

Kingston SV100S2/128G which is an SSDNow V100 with JMicron JMF618 controller.

They have both been sitting around collecting dust. Guess I won't use them for mission critical stuff.

Here's your answer.

Most of the OCZ "problems" are historic. What do I mean by this? They have a history of rushing products to market. That means their SandForce 2281 based drives were on the market long before other companies' products using the same controller like those from Kingston or Intel. OCZ (and a few other companies) was basically burned by immature firmware. Some early adopters who were caught out by these problems are now lifelong haters of OCZ.

There is also some anecdotal evidence that OCZ cuts corners in manufacturing, thus having some failures that were due to this and not firmware. I am not sure of this, as I'm a firm believer that most products come out of the same five factories in China. I'm joking, but the point I'm trying to make is that the same actual factory may be making OCZ drives next to drives of other brands that have a better reputation.

The early firmware issues are, however, true. You can bank on that!

 

Now that would make sense as when I was shopping for my SSD, the Vertex 3 had been released for sale for quite some time, whereas the HyperX for only 6 months. But it goes along with my credo. I always look for products with not so many reviews. And most of these reviews have to be positive (maybe a few negative ones). The idea behind that is I believe we don't hear much from consumers when a product is working properly. But we do hear about it when said product begins to malfunction.

 

Depending on when you bought your drive, the F4 BSOD issue may have been fixed as well, when I bought my SF-2281 drive (Chronos Deluxe), the fix for the BSODs was out, that didn't prevent the drive from dying on me though. My Intel 520 has been rock solid so far and I have abused that drive far more than any of my other SSDs. The only one that caused me issues was the Chronos and I got a brand new one.

 

Yeah, but you do all that simulation stuff. Those mass quantities of calculations will kill any CPU, RAM, and SSD combo out there. But good to know that the Intel SSDs are making a comeback and proving reliable. I am still shopping around for an SSD for my cousin's MBP.

 

Intel didn't manage to catch every major issue with SF-2281 though. When the 520 was first released, there were some reports of BSODs - not nearly as many as there were for other SF-2281 drives, but the Crucial M4 and the Samsung 830 were definitely more reliable at the time.

Ultimately though, at this point SF-2281 is a mature controller (verging on obsolete actually, compared to Marvell 88SS9187-based drives and the Samsung 840 Pro) and has been for quite some time.

 

Very true and my 520 is rather recent, it was bought in November to go with my M6700. The good thing about Intel is that when there is an issue, they usually try to fix it.

 

It may be "obsolete" in terms of computer years, but it still performs. How can any newer controller best that? I guess with slightly higher performance without compression, and even more IOPS.

Me? As long as SATA 6Gb/s remains the top dawg, I'd be happy if SSDs never got any faster... but got a lot cheaper.

 

I agree with zippyzap. Firmwares play a very important role especially in SSDs. This is supported by the fact that the same SF controller used across several brands like Intel is known to have specific issues isolated to the respective brand. As several brands which uses SF controllers develop their own custom firmwares using SF native firmware will be at times buggy which would indirectly end up show casing the controller buggy, which is not actually true. I agree with you on the fact that devices which have lesser reviews are best performing. Really well said radji

 

I suppose that if you don't have any specific needs, Sandforce isn't a bad choice today given the low prices of most SF-2281 drives.

For me, between the barely-functional TRIM implementation and the fact that I need to start/pause/snapshot/revert my VMs all day, every day, the SF-2281 controller just can't keep up. Then again, Sandforce is optimized for "light" workloads that emphasize read over write and random over sequential.

 

Which is another reason I chose the Kingston. I didn't need the write speeds to be high since I wasn't going to use it for anything but normal CPMU. The most strenuous thing I do to my Alienware is transcode my recorded shows from one format to another. And both the original and converted formats are stored on my RAID volume anyway as to cut down on the amount of file transfers I need to do. I just needed my SSD to focus on running the OS and programs which don't require the higher write speeds other SSDs are known for.