Best performing/value SSD or duo, at 40-100GB?

[Biker]

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Online reviews are all well and good but what really counts is real end users real world experience (well to me at least).

A good start are the OCZ forums where some Vertex LE (Sandforce 1500) users are getting bricked drives and / or poor performance in benchmarks.

OCZ predominately test with Atto which seems to give great numbers pretty much all the time but when you throw in other benching tools like AS SSD and Crystalmark etc they portray a very different picture with much lower results than advertised across the board. OCZ also test with IOmeter which I think is a good performance assessment tool but I am presonally not too keen on using it as it tends to take a huge write dump on your array

A good example of the trials and tribulations of a perplexed user is here and there are many more if you search manually (the OCZ forum search function is not the best in my experience)....

After that you could head over to Newegg and check out some user review feedback...


Now I have *no* idea how many Sandforce drives have been sold or what proportion of them have been troublesome but the fact that quite a few are is worrying...



The bottom line is that reports like those referred to above (for me) put a big question mark over the reliability and performance of Sandforce drives...

I do not know anyone on this forum who has got a Sandforce drive (or array) yet apart from Praz and Tony which is probably for these reasons coupled with not very attractive pricing....

Since the OWC is basically the same drive with a different sticker and possibly different firmware then (for me at least) they have to get tarred with the same brush.

I was also consdering buiding an array of Crucial RealSSD C300's but I have also read several reports (most recently over @ Anandtech) where write performance simply drops through the floor so it is not just Sandforce drives that are having issues.



This is unfortunately the fundamental problem with surfing the bleeding edge of technology: there are very often early adopter issues!



Regarding the Sandforce benchmark performance disrepancies and reliability issues these are the questions:


Is it the OS?

Is it the Benchmarks?

Is it the SSD controller?

Is it the SSD design?

Is it the SSD firmware?

Is it the motherboard?

Is it the motherboard bios version and / or bios settings?

Is it Intel playing silly buggers with drivers to make their own SSD's look better?

Is it a combination of some or all of these or something else entirely?


Answer: The jury is still out