[geeks] SSD Choice between Intel and Crucial

[Nathan Raymond]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2014 at 7:25 PM, Andrew Jones <andrew at jones.ec> wrote:

> Intel 320 series was one of Intel's own chipsets, done in house.
>
> The 520 is a completely different animal.  Sandforce chipsets are
> terrible.  They rely on compression for performance, so anything
> incompressible is dismally slow. For example, an encrypted volume in a
> laptop.
>

I think it's a mistake to classify all Sandforce chipsets as terrible.  I
have about a dozen SSDs in systems at home.  Most are either Samsung or
Sandforce.  The Samsung do tend to perform better (barring the bug I'll
mention below) but real-world performance they aren't that different since
in many situations it's the latency advantage and IOPs where SSDs blow
spinning disks out of the water.  Sandforce SSDs can come configured a
number of different ways, the ones I have are not IOPs throttled and have
quality toggle NAND.  I keep the firmware up to date in my SSDs and
intentionally did not buy (and don't recommend buying) an SSD when the
chipset/firmware was new.  I wait for the bugs to get worked out (since an
SSD controller is basically it's own embedded computer with a stripped down
OS, I think waiting makes a lot of sense).

Most of my Sandforce SSDs are Kingston HyperX 3K, which Anand reviewed here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5734/kingston-hyperx-3k-240gb-ssd-review

Of note, that is one of the contenders that made it to 1.5PB in Tech
Report's Endurance test:

http://techreport.com/review/27062/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-only-two-remain-after-1-5pb

The Intel 520 is a fine SSD:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5508/intel-ssd-520-review-cherryville-brings-reliability-to-sandforce

As is the Marvell based M500 series:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6884/crucial-micron-m500-review-960gb-480gb-240gb-120gb

All these chipsets are a few years old at this point.  Not necessarily a
bad thing, but if you want the absolute best performance right now, I'd
suggest looking at either the Samsung 850 Pro:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb-256gb-1tb-review-enter-the-3d-era

or the SanDisk Ultra II:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8520/sandisk-ultra-ii-240gb-ssd-review

Worth noting that even a vertically oriented manufacturer like Samsung is
not without it's firmware issues:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8617/samsung-releases-firmware-update-to-fix-the-ssd-840-evo-read-performance-bug

(and if you read into those Tech Report endurance tests, you'll see the
Samsung SSD there died in an unexpected way)

- Nate