Re: [9fans] anyone put their venti on an SSD?

[Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca>]

On 2013-05-03, at 6:31 PM, cinap_lenrek@gmx.de wrote:

> ocz seems to have a bad reputation. just googled "intel ssd broken"
> and you get tons of results from people with broken/dead ocz ssd's.

Disk drive reliability comes and goes with the seasons.  For years I only ran Seagate disks, and wouldn't go near WD.  Then, after a 30% failure run on < 1 year old Seagates, I switched back to WDs, which have been flawless for me.  So far.  And Hitachi has drifted in and out of the picture over the years.

Ask anyone else and they will tell you a partially to completely different story.  At $80 for a couple of TB, I'll just toss them out when they break.  And while SSD isn't anywhere near that inexpensive yet, it's finally down into the price range where you can call it commodity disk.  These days I'm paying a bit under $1/GB for SSD.  That's cheap enough that I can afford to experiment with smaller sized drives in non-critical applications.

I have a FreeBSD box that's been running off an OCZ Vertex 3 for a few months now without issue. It does regular buildworlds and the like, so I'm not gentle on the write volume.  UFS TRIM support seems to work fine, and if you chose to believe the smart stats, the (128 GB) disk is error free after having many TB written to it.  Many claim Sandforce disks will blow up well before this.  I'm beginning to think otherwise, although my sample space is not statistically significant.

I have a pair of Vertex 4s I haven't installed yet.  I'm curious to see how much (or if) the new OCZ controllers work.  The benchmarks I've read are impressive.  I'm planning to put one into my Mac Mini.  If MacOS and its several hundred GB VM footprint can't kill an SSD, nothing will ;-)

--lyndon