Recommended Posts

Personally I haven't had any issues with Samsung 830 512gb or Crucial M4 256gb / 512gb, but I've also only been on SSDs for about 6 months. Now two of my friends had 128gb OCZ drives that died within a similar time frame, although many others had lots of positive experience with OCZ. I think the technology has matured enough that all manufacturers are probably decent. I looked at MTBF numbers and warranty when choosing my SSDs.

Ironically, my OCZ drive in my laptop just died a few moments ago. About the 6 month mark... It only makes a high pitched whine and won't actually boot or show up as a drive.

My experience isn't anything more than anecdotal evidence, but there you have it.

Regardless of "reliable" or not, every SSD can and will brick eventually. Imagine what happens if you lost the data on it...if you can't handle losing it, then back it up! Buy a standard WD Green and back it up! Use any tool you want - Windows Backup does a great job.

TLDR: Back it up!!

Oh, most 'brand name' (Crucial, OCZ, Samsung, Intel, Corsair) SSDs are good. Some may be a little better, but they all have a reasonable chance to brick on you.

My gut feeling tells me it is a toss up between the Crucial M4 and Samsung 830,

I have a Crucial M4 128GB, it is my first SSD so i dont really have anything to compare it to, and im not going to say its better than the Samsung because that would be biased!

Its just given me no problems, and i know Crucial are very good with their support should anything go wrong.

Regardless of "reliable" or not, every SSD can and will brick eventually. Imagine what happens if you lost the data on it...if you can't handle losing it, then back it up! Buy a standard WD Green and back it up! Use any tool you want - Windows Backup does a great job.

TLDR: Back it up!!

Oh, most 'brand name' (Crucial, OCZ, Samsung, Intel, Corsair) SSDs are good. Some may be a little better, but they all have a reasonable chance to brick on you.

well, yea, obviously. but it's still a PITA when you have to reinstall everything because the OS disk failed. And although every major brand is good, I'm wondering if there's a clear winner anymore. The old Intel controllers were less than 1 percentage point better than the next best but it was still the undisputed champion in reliability. Is there still someone like that anymore with everyone using either Marvell or Sandforce?

My gut feeling tells me it is a toss up between the Crucial M4 and Samsung 830,

I have a Crucial M4 128GB, it is my first SSD so i dont really have anything to compare it to, and im not going to say its better than the Samsung because that would be biased!

Its just given me no problems, and i know Crucial are very good with their support should anything go wrong.

A couple of people have mentioned Samsung, weren't they pretty bad a while ago? Is the current generation much better?

SSDs and other Flash-based storage devices are on the other side of the "reliability" universe: when they die, they die with a sudden bang and you will never, ever be able to extract a single bit from them.

If you want "reliability", you just need to purchase a server-grade hard disk drive. At least, when the end will come for the drive, you will be able to recover something before (and even after) the drive's demise....

SSDs and other Flash-based storage devices are on the other side of the "reliability" universe: when they die, they die with a sudden bang and you will never, ever be able to extract a single bit from them.

If you want "reliability", you just need to purchase a server-grade hard disk drive. At least, when the end will come for the drive, you will be able to recover something before (and even after) the drive's demise....

I would tend to agree, but the performance you get from the SSD is worth the risk of it dying on you. So to protect my self I run an image of my boot / OS drive 3 times a week to an external USB hard drive. My other two machines with SSDs are imaged manually once in a while; but their contents are mostly static so I don't need a weekly backup. Either-way, whether you go with a SSD or a spindle / mechanical drive, you want to have a backup in place if you have important data or just want to save time during recovery.

Ironically, my OCZ drive in my laptop just died a few moments ago. About the 6 month mark... It only makes a high pitched whine and won't actually boot or show up as a drive.

My experience isn't anything more than anecdotal evidence, but there you have it.

Yep, my OCZ drive lived very shortly, and I've had friend's with failed OCZ drives. Some people have good luck with them, and others don't. I can't recommend them at all. My choice is between the Samsung 830 (or newly released 840, although don't know how reliable they are since it's a new model), Crucial M4, and I've had good luck with Intel 320 series. In any case, the lesson is backup all your data, regardless of the brand.

My OCZ disks have been pretty good.

I had one fail on me, but I overwrote the error flags and it just kept on trucking.

I'd recommend OCZ or Samsung. The Samsungs seen quite good, and as you can see, lots of people recommending them :)

Yarp

I have little experience of my own with SSDs but the Sand Disk Extreme 256GB that I have is been more than good. The price was a steal and the speeds are awesome.

I think many of the early SDD issues like reliability and rewrites have been improved by all manufacturers. I would say try to find the best bang for the buck.

And as other guyhere pointed out: Back everything up just in case. In my case, I keep separate file backups from folders I use on the SSD, not the entire drive because I don't mind reinstall eveything again.

My intuition tells me Crucial m4. Fast and a great Marvell controller.

Three-way tie between Crucial m4 (Marvell controller), Intel 330/520 (modded SandForce controller), and Samsung 83x/84x (Samsung MCX controller).

Note that the generic SandForce controller is not listed (along with the generic Marvell controller) - also MIA is the newer version of the OCZ Vertex 4 (modded Marvell controller, different from the controller of the Crucial m4).

On this topic, we have been switching laptops at work over to Samsung 840's but haven't seen any failures or issues yet, albeit we are just starting to convert over and a few months old. The drives are in laptops with 100% data on SSD. Also drives are encrypted with a third party program so that makes more use I suppose.

I have been wanting to switch to SSD myself in the past but have been too gun shy about it because of the relatively short life on them. I have figured the best practice would be to install OS only on SSD and then use HDD for data/programs etc.. Would this in theory bring the life span of the drive to last longer since the amount of writes is less?

I would tend to agree, but the performance you get from the SSD is worth the risk of it dying on you.

It's a choice you have to make. And until SSD drives won't have something more meaningful for data storage like PCM of memristor chips (let's say, within the next five years?), I will always choose to spend the extra money an SSD will cost on a server-grade hard disk drives with spinning platters....

It seems like the general concensus is a toss-up between Crucial M4 and Samsung 830/840. I read on Anandtech that their review units of the 840 Pro both broke, has that been fixed? And are there significant differences between the Marvell controller on Crucial and the Samsung controllers?

It's a choice you have to make. And until SSD drives won't have something more meaningful for data storage like PCM of memristor chips (let's say, within the next five years?), I will always choose to spend the extra money an SSD will cost on a server-grade hard disk drives with spinning platters....

that's assuming that you value reliability above all else.

Plextor M5 Pro

I second that.

The Plextor M3/M5 series are basically Crucial M4s without the firmware problems (legendary Plextor Firmware engineering and QA) and with an included 5 year parts warranty (the 1st 3 years you don't even pay shipping in case of a RMA, they send someone pick up the drive at your doorstep)

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • GnuCash 5.16 by Razvan Serea GnuCash is a personal and small business finance application, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It’s designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible. GnuCash allows you to track your income and expenses, reconcile bank accounts, monitor stock portfolios and manage your small business finances. It is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports. GnuCash can keep track of your personal finances in as much detail as you prefer. If you are just starting out, use GnuCash to keep track of your checkbook. You may then decide to track cash as well as credit card purchases to better determine where your money is being spent. When you start investing, you can use GnuCash to help monitor your portfolio. Buying a vehicle or a home? GnuCash will help you plan the investment and track loan payments. If your financial records span the globe, GnuCash provides all the multiple-currency support you need. Between 5.15 and 5.16, the following bugfixes were accomplished: Bug 421610 - RFE: Include logical dates for View->Filter by "date range"The Select Range section of the Date tab of the register's Filter By dialog box is changed to provide relative, specific date, or days ago options for the start and end of the filter range. The Show number of days item label is changed to Show from days ago to better reflect what it does. Bug 436105 - esc key not working as expected in register: Enable the escape key to cancel a field edit. Bug 797384 - Gnucash doesn't handle commodity prices with big numerator/denominator properly. Bug 798004 - Next gen UI for stock transactions Bug 799314 - Add "enter now" option in scheduled transaction editor. tab to allow users to select the scheduled transactions to be included in a “Since Last Run…” window. If there are no instances of a selected transaction triggered by today’s date, the next instance is triggered. Bug 799751 - autocomplete crash Bug 799759 - Users can't Enable entries via Checkboxes on Scheduled Transactions PageAllow the Enabled box in the list of scheduled transactions to be operated instead of having to open the transaction editor dialog and change the Enabled checkbox. Also added use of the Name column as the secondary column sort for all the other columns. Bug 799762 - Poor handling of cases where hidden/placeholder accounts are used in the account register Bug 799766 - Double line preference not respected in search register Bug 799767 - POST /accounts in bindings/python/example_scripts/rest-api is broken Bug 799777 - `xaccSplitSetParent`: reparenting a committed split silently drops its KVP slots (online_id, cap-gains links) Other changes & improvements: Numeric values may now be selected to copy in the Accounts page. Add new Finance::Quote source Finnhub.io: Free API key (personal/non-professional use) available at https://finnhub.io. Set FINNHUB_API_KEY environment variable to API key to use this source. As of June 2026, free tier API limit is 60 API calls/minute. The Investment Lots report has new optional columns for Computed Annual Growth Rate. Python Bindings: Improved translation of primary object (Account, Transaction, Split, etc.) so that they can be treated as normal Python objects. This is accomplished with SWIG magic so no existing code is obsoleted. Python Bindings: Better conversion of GLists to Python lists. Python Bindings: Destroy the QofSession in the Python Session dtor to prevent leaving the database locked. [engine] Add first-class online_id accessors for Split and Account and make them available to Python bindings, removing the unused Transaction online_id property. Improve C++ implementation of QofBook. Correct the Doxygen doc for qof_instance_get/set_kvp. [gnc-log-replay.cpp] fix incorrect guid dump Add some Boost library requirements needed by libgnucash-guile to CMakeLists.txt so that missing feature will fail at configure time. Use Compile-time Regular Expressions instead of std::regex in gnc-filepath-utils.cpp and instead of boost::regex in the CSV importer, with the CTRE v3.11.1 header added to borrowed [gnc-filepath-utils.cpp] null check char* arguments Add ChartJS licenses. Removed AEX from list of commodities. euronext.com is now using JS based anti-webscraping. [report-core] always offer options summary in reports. This is useful to debug reports. The Add options summary option is removed because it's no longer optional. Remove remaining obsolete IMContext from sheet Fix blurry text in HiDPI offscreen-rendered widgets Add port field to database connection dialog: The convention of appending the port number after the host isn't obvious. When editing a split in the register treat the account as being changed only if it isn't the one selected before editing instead of if the user performed an edit Return immediately from qof_book_destroy if hash_of_collections is null. If qof_book_destroy is called on a QofBook* freshly created with qof_book_new (usually because it was used to create a session that now must be destroyed) it would try to empty the non-existent hash tables, crashing. Clean up Flathub metadata to solve warnings at flatpak build time. Be consistent in naming GncPluginPage and GncPluginPageRegister HTML: Remove unimplemented function declarations. [gnc-html.cpp] remove unused buggy string conversion functions Convert libgnc-html to C++ Apply -Wall -Werr -Wmissing-prototypes to C++ compilation on Windows and fix the resulting errors. New and Updated Translations: Arabic, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, German, Finnish, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian-Bokmal, Spanish Download: GnuCash 5.16 | 176.0 MB (Open Source) Links: GnuCash Home page | Other Operating Systems | Screenshot Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
    • Microsoft finally launches WSL Containers in public preview by David Uzondu Microsoft has announced that WSL containers, a feature that allows developers to run Linux containers natively inside Windows without the need for Docker Desktop, is now available in public preview several weeks after Microsoft previewed it at Build 2026. To use the new container feature, you first have to install the latest pre-release version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux by running a quick update command in your terminal: wsl --update --pre-release After installing, you'd get access to the new Linux container CLI (wslc.exe) and the programmable API. Microsoft said that the CLI has a "familiar format" that matches the toolsets developers already use every day. If you know standard Docker commands, your muscle memory will translate directly to wslc.exe, which even features a built-in alias called container.exe. You can quickly run a full Ubuntu KDE desktop container by exposing ports, or pass your graphics card straight into a machine learning environment to run PyTorch workloads. Passing the --gpus all flag inside the run command instantly links your hardware. Image via Microsoft As for the API, developers can now embed Linux container operations directly inside native Windows applications without exposing the command line to users. The team integrated the API directly into MSBuild and CMake, so developers can define container steps directly in project files. Apart from bringing the CLI and API into public preview, Microsoft also said that it's working on a new default file system called virtiofs to speed up file transfer rates between Windows and Linux. Microsoft also introduced an experimental networking mode named consomme, which resolves compatibility issues with corporate VPNs by routing Linux network traffic straight through Windows. One thing to note about WSL containers is that they don't run in your standard WSL distributions; instead, every application and CLI session spawns its own lightweight Hyper-V utility VM in the background. This basically reduces the chances of one app snooping on the container of another app.
    • Google reportedly limited Meta's Gemini access over limited AI compute by Karthik Mudaliar Google is reportedly limiting Meta's use of its Gemini AI models after Meta tried buying more computing capacity than even Google could supply. According to the Financial Times, Google told Meta in March that it could not provide the full Gemini capacity that Meta had requested. This shortfall even disrupted and delayed some of Meta's internal projects. Due to this, Meta even told its employees internally to use AI tokens more efficiently. Meta wasn't the only one to get hit by this sudden refusal by Google; even other customers were affected. But Meta was hit harder because of its unusually high demand for Google's models. The move from Google makes it evident that companies all over are in limited supply of both infrastructure and compute. Alphabet said in April that Google Cloud revenue grew 63% year-over-year to $20 billion in the first quarter, helped by enterprise AI infrastructure and AI solutions. In pursuit of more compute, Meta had earlier signed a multi-billion-dollar AWS agreement as well as a large AMD GPU deal for AI data centers. But the crunch would be short-lived as both Meta and Google have also ramped up infrastructure investments heavily. Meta said in November that it was committing more than $600 billion in the U.S. by 2028 for AI technology, infrastructure, and workforce expansion. In the first quarter of this year, Meta also raised its expected capital expenditure for 2026 to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion, citing higher component pricing and additional data center costs for future capacity. However, this doesn't make the company immune to the current dependence on outside suppliers. Meta has also spent many years promoting Llama as an open-weight alternative to closed models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. But if the reported reliance on Google's Gemini models is severe enough for internal work to get impacted, then it looks like even frontier labs and Big Tech aren't fully self-sufficient. Source: Financial Times
    • I like to reminisce about the good old days, way back in autumn 2025 when building a gaming machine was fun and the drives were about $150 when you caught a deal. Yes duh, back in the day we had it gone. Then baby Skynet came along, hiding in AI datacenters demanding more processing power until it reached singularity. End of a not totally fictional story.
    • My experience in the past with older Windows 11 builds was not great on unsupported machines but I recently used Rufus to put the latest build on a older 5th Gen Core Thinkpad T that we upgraded with a SATA SSD and 8GB of RAM four years ago when hardware was reasonable and it seemed pretty fast and solid. Customer is very happy with the performance and will probably get four more years out of that venerable laptop that he loves so much. Another customer just retired his Dell Studio laptop from 2009 running Windows 10. It got an SSD over 10 years ago and did everything he needed it to for 17 years but he also retired last year and is happy doing everything on his iPad now.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Reacting Well
      NovaEdgeX earned a badge
      Reacting Well
    • Week One Done
      NovaEdgeX earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Year In
      BA the Curmudgeon earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Conversation Starter
      rosiecharles earned a badge
      Conversation Starter
    • First Post
      KMilenkoski1202 earned a badge
      First Post
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      533
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      269
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      150
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      98
    5. 5
      macoman
      66
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!