New Intel 520 Series SSD Taps SandForce Controller

crookedvulture writes "Intel continues to partner with third-party controller makers for high-end SSDs. Its new 520 Series drives pair the latest SandForce controller with Intel's own firmware and 25-nm NAND. HotHardware, Tech Report, and PC Perspective all have reviews of the drive, and the verdict is pretty consistent. While the Intel 520 Series offers slightly better performance than competing SandForce solutions, it also costs 30-40% more. That's a steep margin even considering the Intel SSD's five-year warranty."

Comments

Sometimes

[Gr8Apes]

Ad yet my X25M, which came at a steep price, is still performing well 1.5 years later while several others I know have gone through several competing drives in the same period. Anecdotal, I know, but when I decided on a drive, the only one without the kind of failure stories my colleagues went through was the Intel drive. Sometimes you do get what you pay for.

Re:Sometimes

[spectral7]

Anandtech mentions that the 520 went through a year of testing, so it should be much more reliable than other SF-2200 SSDs. Also fixed a BSOD issue in one of their systems, which was also using SF-2281.

Re:Sometimes

[hairyfeet]

The problem with SSDs was nailed by the guys at coding horror and that is SSDs are still new enough tech it works on a "Hot/crazy" scale. Smoking hot speeds, crazy failure rates. A couple of my gamer customers have gone through like 4 of the things each in the past two years, and these ain't the cheap ones either, its whatever scored highest on the benches which is usually the top dollar stuff. They've already learned don't put anything on an SSD you give a shit about unless you have it backed up because unlike a HDD which will give you some warning the SSDs just go "poof" and that's it. No getting your data back, no tricks, just one day it works and the next its toast.

Re:Sometimes

[smash]

Support to get a replacement drive doesn't mean dick if your data is gone. And warranty won't recover that.

Re:Sometimes

[tlhIngan]

A couple of my gamer customers have gone through like 4 of the things each in the past two years, and these ain't the cheap ones either, its whatever scored highest on the benches which is usually the top dollar stuff.

That's the problem.

If you want the new hotness in SATA3 OMGWTFBBQ speeds, you're going to risk crappy firmware. It's because the firmware writers are under pressure to deliver software so the SSD manufacturers can deliver SSDs a month earlier than the competition with their new fast SSD.

So yeah, there will be lots of bugs if you're constantly going cutting edge.

On the other hand, OEMs like Dell, Lenovo, and notably, Apple, are shipping millions of SSD-equipped computers every year. If there was a massive failure rate, we'd hear about it - especially Apple, which shipped millions of SSD-equipped MacBook Airs and Macbook Pros and others. Hell, you'd hear of petitions asking to recall every SSD-equipped Mac if they were dropping like flies. Hell, if even 1,000 of them failed, you'd probably hear of a recall petition

The difference? The OEMs are using SSDs that are more conservative - sure they're not going to push 250+MB/sec (probably 150MB/sec or so), but they're far more reliable. The controllers have long matured and the firmware is stable and major data loss bugs are now squashed.

Perhaps rather than caring about 150/200/250/300 MB/sec transfer rate (you're talking about seconds in difference at that point), your friends should've bought what was last-generation and stable. Perhaps even see what's in stores like Best Buy because they take so long to get product that all the first adopters would've been burned that by the time retail stores have 'em, they're all stable.

The OEMs usually buy Samsung or Toshiba (with Samsung or Toshiba controllesr, respectively) SSDs. They'd probably use Intel if they could, if it wasn't for the fact every generation, Intel has some SSD problem in the early firmware. The original G1s had a speed degradation issue. The G2's had a massive data loss bug. The G3's also had a dataloss bug. These new ones? Probably a data loss bug as well. Sure they get fixed, but buying a last-gen will probably be a good idea. Or wait 6 months to see what issues arise.

Re:Sometimes

[Miamicanes]

> Using RAID 1 during those circumstances is like building two houses next to a volcano instead of just one.

Yep. Just ask anybody who bought a pair of OCZ Velocity2 Sandforce-based drives and mirrored them in the hope of avoiding data loss... and had both of them simultaneously commit suicide thanks to the wonderful bug that triggers the "3 minutes to deathcrash" condition (never fear, though... the drive itself is "fine" -- just Securely Erase (tm) it, and it'll be good for a few more weeks until it kills all the data on it again).

Sandforce is the worst steaming pile of shit that has ever existed in a mainstream product. Their controllers have fucked so many users, they can't even get ENTHUSIASTS (who lose sleep at night worrying that their controller might be .05% slower than somebody else's) to care about their benchmarks anymore. The only reason I won't be chucking mine is because I might need it for the class action suit against OCZ and/or Sandforce someday.

Re:Sometimes

[JDG1980]

Yeah seems to me that Intel is actually helping Sandforce fix the bugs in Sandforce's product. Not for free of course, but one wonders about the long term strategic reasons for this. They could have let Sandforce keep churning out SSDs with buggy firmware.

The Anandtech article indicates that the fixed firmware will be exclusive to Intel for a certain (unspecified) period of time, before being made available to other SandForce vendors. So what Intel gets for their time and effort is a period of exclusivity.

Re:Sometimes

[JDG1980]

Exactly, thanks smash. I mean who gives a flying fuck about the drive? but if you are working on some important term paper or business proposal and the SSD decides NOW is the time its gonna crap itself? That's when you realize that hot speed isn't worth the crazy failure rates. I mean either you have every. single. change of any note backed up or you are literally rolling the dice. try contacting them and asking about your data, they'll tell you tough luck, it isn't covered.

That's why you store your actual data on magnetic drives - preferably on a NAS with ZFS software RAID. The SSD should only have the OS, installed software, and miscellaneous stuff like cache and swapfile. All this can easily be replaced from a drive image; at most you might need to reinstall a couple of software updates. If you keep a lot of important data on a SSD, you're doing it wrong. Putting the OS and software on SSD gives you all the speed advantage while minimizing downside risk.

Re:Sometimes

[TheDarkMaster]

I do not understand your apparent anger against RAID0 ... For me it works very well, why it annoys you? I have a third hard drive for backup, the HDDs used in RAID are reliable (not SSDs, still too experimental), and according to reports from the S.M.A.R.T. they still have long useful life ahead. Oh, the boot disk is in a SSD (yep, four drives rig, the RAID0 is a gaming/general data drive), but I do not mind having to reinstall if there is a problem here, since it is still experimental and therefore I do not put anything critical on the SSD.

In short: RAID0 increases the chances of data loss? Yep. But is not the panacea that everyone writes as if he was going to explode when they were powered on, or kill your cat.

Re:Sometimes

[hairyfeet]

But you see there is your problem smash, you are thinking like one of us geeks instead of like a normal. hell a normal if you mentioned RAID would go in their kitchen and hand you the bug spray!

You have to remember they have gotten pretty damned good with the failure rates of spinning rust, even in mobile. All the drives now have sensors that park the heads when its moving or jostled, sensors for heat, SMART, they are pretty damned good now. Hell the only way i was able to get folks doing regular backups was with butt simple USB externals and an even simpler software like Paragon drive backup.

That is why I warn folks away from the SSDs now, because they don't know about hot/crazy scales or insane failure rates, they just know "Wow that is a fast laptop!" and then when that SSD takes a dump they are hurting. You don't know how heartbreaking it is to be sitting in the shop with some girl crying her eyes out because there is a good chance the pictures of her late mom she forgot to backup could be gone forever, but at least with HDDs there are usually tricks i can do to get a good chunk of the stuff off, but not with SSDs, its all or nothing.

So I'd say anybody selling SSDs to average folks is frankly doing them a disservice. you and I know "Backup backup and backup some more" and for the important things like pics of my late sis and other important items I have onsite, offsite AND cloud based backups, but most folks frankly don't have the skills nor the dedication, they have stressed out lives and shit happens you know? So I consider it the job of us geeks to try to make their computing experience as safe as we can while still having it useful and I'd say that SSDs just aren't there yet.

I value warranties

[timeOday]

With the concerns often expressed over SSD reliability, it's interesting that Intel's 5 year warranty now bests the other SSD's 3 year warranty, whereas hard drives are moving to 1 year warranty(!)

.

I get really worried when the warranty is so short, I would be extremely frustrated if the thing conked out the day after. Whereas after 5 years, I would probably be ready to move on.

Hopefully it's more reliable

[AaronW]

I just returned an OCZ Agility 3 due to it dying after 2 weeks of light use as my Linux root partition running XFS. Since their office was local I drove it there to save shipping charges and had to laugh in their lobby since they're touting reliability. Sadly Sandforce has gained a reputation for not being the most reliable controller out there. I have never had a hard drive fail except after years of use until this one died. Fortunately it's being replaced under warranty.

Also, unlike other drives I've had fail, this one died suddenly and completely. Suddenly Linux couldn't access the root filesystem and after rebooting the drive could not be found by the SATA controller. Fortunately I had my old Western Digital Velociraptor drive I had replaced so I swapped that back in.

I have another Sandforce SSD that would often not show up when my computer woke up from standby until after a firmware update. Intel might be better, having written their own firmware, but at this point I think SSDs have a way to go in terms of reliability. There's no excuse for the issues that have been reported with the various Sandforce drives. The problem is either insufficient Q/A testing of the firmware or management pushing out the firmware before it's ready. It's also possible that there might be some hardware glitch causing these drives to fail.

-Aaron

Re:Hopefully it's more reliable

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

ocz agility 3 - mac osx - 5 mo. use without problem and even though i haven't passed the early failure window im tossing in the datapoint. *IF* it fails (i feel i trust it, but hey) i'll be here to bitch about it in the future :-) Rarely hear from the happy ones, i've found... i wonder what the failure rate really is?

Samsung SSD 830 is also a good choice.

[teh31337one]

When I bought my 2nd SSD a few weeks ago (first was an M4 for my laptop, this being for my desktop), I opted for a 128GB Samsung SSD 830. It's a great little drive, and was ~30% cheaper than Intel SSD 510.

I went for the 830 over a Sandforce-based drive because of their reliability. There's a reason why Apple use Samsung SSDs in their laptops.

Re:Samsung SSD 830 is also a good choice.

[EjectButton]

When I bought my 2nd SSD a few weeks ago (first was an M4 for my laptop, this being for my desktop), I opted for a 128GB Samsung SSD 830. It's a great little drive, and was ~30% cheaper than Intel SSD 510.

I went for the 830 over a Sandforce-based drive because of their reliability. There's a reason why Apple use Samsung SSDs in their laptops.

Intel care more about reliability than anyone else in the SSD game and they are now using the exact same sandforce controller (SF-2200) in this new drive that others have been using for a while now (OCZ Vertex 3 for example). The problems in the past were more with the firmware than the controllers.

Pfft Sandforce

[Vegemeister]

The Sandforce controllers use compression to increase speeds and reduce write amplifications. Thus, they choke on encrypted (incompressible) data. They also have a horrible record of reliability. No thanks.

320 Series Bug

[Kunedog]

I have bought six X25Ms in total; all are tremendous performers and give me no problems. The are all G2s and range in age from 1 to 2 years (except for a used 40GB one I bought a month ago).

Unfortunately the Intel 320 series (really the X25-M G3) has had its own reliability issues with a nasty firmware bug that causes it to suddenly report its capacity as 8MB (causing complete data loss).

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/236468/intel_acknowledges_ssd_320_bug_working_on_firmware_upgrade.html

Intel on Sunday acknowledged that a bug could cause its SSD 320 solid-state drives to fail, and said a firmware upgrade is on its way to address the problem.

In some instances, a power loss may cause Intel's SSD 320 drives to crash and lose data. On rebooting the system, the system BIOS could report the SSD as having only 8MB of storage capacity. Intel two weeks ago said the error was possibly a bug, and that the issue was being investigated.

"Intel has reproduced 'Bad Context 13x Error' utilizing strenuous testing methods. This 'Bad Context 13x Error' can be addressed via a firmware update and Intel is in the process of validating the firmware update. A future update will define the schedule to deliver the firmware fix," an Intel spokeswoman said in an e-mail statement.

It's ironic that a power failure triggers this problem, since Intel had marketed the 320 as especially resilient to them:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review

Intel always prided itself on not storing any user data in its DRAM cache. The external DRAM is only used to cache mapping tables and serve as the controller's scratchpad. In the event of a sudden loss of power, Intel only has to commit whatever data it has in its SRAM to NAND. To minimize the amount of data loss in the event of a sudden power failure, Intel outfitted the SSD 320 with an array of six 470F capacitors in parallel.

Some posters say it can happen without a power failure:

http://communities.intel.com/message/133499

Intel said they found the cause and released a firmware update, but applying it seems to have actually triggered the bug in previously problem-free drives for many posters:

http://communities.intel.com/thread/24121?start=0&tstart=0

Intel has not acknowledged any problems with the fix, nor told anyone which serial numbers were affected. Nobody has reported on the bug since Intel said they fixed it, including Anand.

This issue was enough to convince me to buy something else (even though the 320 series would otherwise have been my first choice) when I had to shop for an SSD last month. I found a used "like new" (according to the SMART data, at least) X25-M G2 on amazon instead.

Interestingly, X25-M G2 prices have held steady ($2/GB or so) and only gone up over the last year. Yeah it's probably because of dwindling supply, but I can't help but suspect that lack of confidence in the 320 series may have contributed to an increase in demand for the G2.

Re:Same Story with me

[Miamicanes]

> I love how they state on their website that the mean time for failure is something like 130 years.

Oh, that's because the hardware ITSELF will last for 130 years. The half-life of any data you STORE on it is about 7 weeks. If the offices of both Sandforce and OCZ were replaced by smoldering nuclear craters tomorrow morning, I'd smile and say, "at least they can't screw anybody else now" (well, once the remaining inventory stocked by Amazon & Newegg was gone).