High (somehow) performance SSD for Centos workstation

[vl1969]

Perhaps, but the reviews are pretty good for the price point. Not 850 Pro levels but decent enough. At 50cents Canadian per GB (after taxes & shipping) this is pretty good to me.

Once I get this thing I'll migrate to it and re-run the same tests as I did in this thread, then we can compare. I'm not expecting miracles but I'm expecting a decent improvement. After all, the HDD I currently use was in my HTPC which in 2010 got upgraded to a cheap OCZ Vertex2 40GB SSD, and I saw day & night improvement at that time. I would expect the BX100 to be order of magnitudes better than the Vertex2 and also the other components are also better than my HTPC so overall, if there is not much difference between the current Hitachi HDD and the BX100 SSD, I will start to rethink everything...

not to rain on your parade, but if I were you I would start looking for a replacement for that OCZ Vertex2 .
before it go. I just had an OCZ 120GB fail for no apparent reason in my HTPC.
it was only 1.5yo. my HTPC runs mostly 24/7 with occasional reboot or couple of days down time when i press the wrong button now and than.
it was on and running but I got several errors and decided to reboot, and that was it. it never came back up.
it seams OCZ have a bad track record with this kind of sudden death syndrome thing.
while you can make an image of it and start looking for replacement.

 

[andrewbedia]

Rule of thumb is that you pretty much cannot go wrong with buying Intel SSDs. Their QA process is outstanding.

Please don't buy 120GB SSDs. It's a terrible return on investment and you lose out on performance.

RE: OCZ: some of their drives are good, some are not. I have three of them (1 in my laptop, 1 in CentOS7/KVM/QEMU server, and 1 in my desktop). I've never had issues with any of them. OCZ Deneva 2 R 400GB, Agility 4 512GB.

 

[vl1969]

Rule of thumb is that you pretty much cannot go wrong with buying Intel SSDs. Their QA process is outstanding.

Please don't buy 120GB SSDs. It's a terrible return on investment and you lose out on performance.

RE: OCZ: some of their drives are good, some are not. I have three of them (1 in my laptop, 1 in CentOS7/KVM/QEMU server, and 1 in my desktop). I've never had issues with any of them. OCZ Deneva 2 R 400GB, Agility 4 512GB.

why would you say 120GB SSD is terible ROI?
it's all depends on what you need it for. for example for a laptop you might be right. most laptops support only single drive and hence limiting the drive space there is not too smart.
for desktop, where you can add more drives as needed using a small SSD for system is not bad at all.
same as for server where you only need an OS drive. it boots fast, backup is small and fast. you only need as much as OS require + some room to grow a bit.
for example, I am currently running CentOS7 setup on my server (just building out a new CentOS7+KVM+QEMU) I used a 240GB SSD for system, only because at the time this was only thing I had. but the whole setup only uses less than 60GB, a one forth of the disk, I figure it's a waist of perfectly good disk space. a 120GB would have been perfect size. in fact a pair of 120 in a raid1 setup would be just what the doctor ordered. why? because I am not planning to keep all the VM stuff on the drive, I have a separate drive for that.
now on my main desktop and my laptop I use 240. laptop hav only single drive so it's no brainier.
and desktop is fine too as I am keeping all other things on second drive and my server.

for my HTPC I used 120 only because it was cheap. I could be using 64GB instead, but the price difference between 64 and 120 was like $10 so here we are

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

My rule of thumb says your time and money is better spent on having more and better and properly tested backups than replacing a currently-working SSD. In my experience, all SSDs that die do so suddenly. OCZ may have been the worst of the bunch, but no manufacturer or technology is immune to problems so it's always best to have a backup before you have a more-reliable-on-paper drive.

FWIW I have a sole surviving 60GB vertex 2 My 30GB vertex is still working in the HTPC in the spare room...

 

[vl1969]

well I did not suggest replacing the drive just make an image of it
and research possible replacement in advance.
as for backup, well like I say I try to put only system on the SSD and it's still a hustle to reinstall all the way you like it. it does give you an opportunity to switch the OS or move on to a more updated one though . that is how I moved off Windows to Linux on my main PC

 

[Keljian]

Going against the grain, for desktop use I can't go past the 850 pro for reliability or the Toshiba (ocz) arc 100 for value. Both have plenty of speed to keep you out of trouble. Both make excellent desktop drives.

The arc 100 is my go to- recommendation drive for relatives. The 850 pro i trust a lot more (10 year warranty! - to support that they must have done heaps of testing).

 

[lpallard]

not to rain on your parade, but if I were you I would start looking for a replacement for that OCZ Vertex2 .
before it go.

Haha I agree with you 100% but I already have an image of my HTPC... if something goes terribly wrong, so be it! Plus, I was expecting the Vertex SSD to die a long time ago and its still going strong. For how long? I dunno but next SSD will be an Intel for the reliability.

The Vertex was one of the first consumer affordable SSD on the market when I bought it back in early 2010.. I think I paid 120$ back then for 40GB!!! Ouch...

I agree with some users saying that the cost-size benefit may be better with 250+GB SSD's but for a HTPC or another machine that will not store user data (or only a few GB's) the price point is #1 criteria IMO and by far... So next SSD for my HTPC will be the smallest decent cap and the cheapest ($$). Prob an Intel.

As for the Crucial I just purchased for my desktop computer, I have been using it for 3 days now, and I have had the chance to appreciate how performing it was. In all, I can say that while this is clearly not a race car by any means, its absolutely faster than the older Hitachi HDD. Things are almost instantaneous and I notice a huge difference. The only downside is when I ran fio again in direct mode, I was disappointed by the IOPS reported. fio reported around 19500 iops. I was expecting a lot more. Bandwidth wise, its showing SATA3 capabilities big time...

For 125$ I deem this an OK upgrade, not extraordinary not totally disappointing. I wonder however how a 850 Pro would perform in the same computer?

For now, I'll keep an eye on the OCZ one in case it starts behaving. Next time I post on this forum for SSD question, it will be for a ZFS storage server...

Thanks guys for the input!