Intel SSD and the rest...

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27 Jun 2008
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Can someone please enlighten me on the fact that some people prefer buying Intel SSD despite the fact that they tend to be more expensive and there are now faster ones on the market. am I missing something?:eek:
 
None at all. You don't tend to see any "OMG my X25 died" kinda threads, no problems with firmware. It performs well out of the box and is very easy to set up.

I think Intel certainly hold the strongest reliability and overall build quality card, which a lot of people prefer over the extra performance. After all - the biggest speed gains from an SSD is when you go from a mechanical drive to one, not when you upgrade from one SSD to another.
 
None at all. You don't tend to see any "OMG my X25 died" kinda threads, no problems with firmware. It performs well out of the box and is very easy to set up.

I think Intel certainly hold the strongest reliability and overall build quality card, which a lot of people prefer over the extra performance. After all - the biggest speed gains from an SSD is when you go from a mechanical drive to one, not when you upgrade from one SSD to another.

Thanks a bunch Tute! I did experience your last point when moving from agility to vertex2 (the wow factor has vanished:D)
 
None at all. You don't tend to see any "OMG my X25 died" kinda threads, no problems with firmware. It performs well out of the box and is very easy to set up.

I think Intel certainly hold the strongest reliability and overall build quality card, which a lot of people prefer over the extra performance. After all - the biggest speed gains from an SSD is when you go from a mechanical drive to one, not when you upgrade from one SSD to another.

Spot on.
Bought my first G2 close to a year ago, when it was head and shoulders above the rest, and then picked up a second one on the MM for RAID0.
One big factor for me was that they had published numbers for their Write Amplification and gave a solid estimate for writes lifespan (20GB/day for 5 years), whereas all the other manufacturers were suspiciously quiet (I think this is going to come back and bite a lot of Indilinx owners),

The Sandforce drives are a solid competitor now and seem to have write amplification under control, but we're still seeing issues with them - drives disappearing from BIOS, drives getting into unrecoverable states if you bench them too hard etc.
Also most benchmarks don't tell the whole story, If you check out IOMeter It's clear that despite what the 4K benches might indicate, the Intel absolutely dominates Sandforce when it comes to average transaction time and the corresponding IOPS in various benchmark patterns. This seems to indicate to me that Sandforce etc is a bit of a one trick pony tweaked for benchmarks and real word performance would still have the Intel in the lead.

http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=912&type=expert&pid=7
 
Also I think cost wise they are no more expensive than other ssds. Cost per gb is roughly on par with other brands. As said its the proven reliability and the better all round performance that a lot of people see in intel ssds.
 
Especially with the recently announced price drop, hope we'll see a good price for the 120GB Intel G2.

I think the Intel's are less radical a design than the Sandforce-based devices but it's a solid performer. Perhaps the analogy is the Intel is a Volvo and the Sandforce are TVR's :)
 
And don't be forgetting the outstsnding low latency of intel drives. As an owner of an X25m and Vertex 2E I can tell you the intel is an excellent OS drive.
 
intel ssd toolbox is also a nice little application too.
easy to use and schedule, just how utilities should be.

i have a 160gb intel G2 as my boot drive and another as a drive specifically for my games.
they have never let me down
 
The same reason people buy BMW's when you can get equivalent spec cars with more power for less money, The badge and the reliability record that comes with it
 
I bought 2 x G2s over a year ago (both still working well) and I suppose it's trademark is decent overall performance with good reliability and after having been on the market for over a year, overall they are still hard to beat in terms of reliability/performance stakes.
 
I think it speaks volumes that i'm crying out for extra space, but i'm happy to hold on where I am for the G3 drives. I'm not interested in Indilinx or Sandforce drives at this point, I believe there's still niggles to work out.

I firmly believe the X25-Ms are the best all round SSDs on the market.
 
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