What reliable and cheap SSD do you recommend for the boot drive?

[Bidule0hm]

My USB stick is dying (at least now I confirmed my zpool script works... :P) and I want something more reliable for the future.

What I want is a cheap but reliable SSD of 32, 64 or 128 GB, I don't care about the other things (perfs, power consumption, ...), what do you recommend?

 

[nightshade00013]

I am running a PNY XLR8 ssd in my desktop that has been great.

Any of the brands that have been building them for a while would be good and I have heard great things about the samsung made ssd's and if I had the cash I would pick up one of their 850 pro series for my wife's laptop.

I will say that a lot of people swear by the intel controllers and drives. I would imagine that any ssd will have a longer life than a flash drive though as long as it is made by a good company.

 

[tvsjr]

I picked up two Intel 320, 40GB SSDs off eBay for $26/ea. Yes, you're taking the standard gamble with eBay... these arrived with <500 power-on hours and ~1.5TB lifetime device writes, or 8% of the device's lifetime used. I'm running a mirrored pair just to be safe, but I predict a long service life.

Since I've got a big 36-bay Supermicro chassis, I bought two of the 3.5/2.5 adapter sleds and installed them that way. I suppose I could mount the drives internally and connect them directly to the motherboard, and maybe I will someday if I want the extra two drive bays, but this was a clean and elegant solution.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Thanks for your posts ;)

 

[HoneyBadger]

Anything other than Kingston or OCZ.

The obvious answer though is Intel. Just watch for the 8MB firmware bug.

 

[Handle]

OCZ was acquired by Toshiba and is good to go again because they use Toshiba NAND-Chips now.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, really, just go out to your local electronics retailer and pick up two of the cheapest SSD's that you can find, maybe from different mfrs, and then mirror them. For what FreeNAS does to the boot drive, it's relatively light duty for a typical SSD.

I just picked up a pair of SanDisk 120's for like $35-$40 each recently. SSD is getting so cheap that no one wants the small ones anymore. I'm probably an outlier in that I don't actually put much of value on any laptop, desktop, or other electronic device... they're all just windows into "the network." If you're not storing all your precious pictures, media, documents, etc., on your computer, then suddenly a 120GB SSD is very generous for boot drive.

Anyways, the other thing to do is to remember that you can underprovision the drive, if the manufacturer provides a tool for that, and you may get some additional apparent endurance out of the device (since it will be able to survive more failed blocks).

 

[Ericloewe]

Yeah, any cheap SSD from a good brand will be fine.

SanDisk, in particular, tends to have small, reasonably-priced units.
Crucial seems to be abandoning the smaller capacities (NAND costs are probably minimal at this point).
Samsung doesn't have much low-capacity stuff either.
I think there are a few smallish Toshibas.

Then there's all the more dubious stuff.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Thanks all ;)

 

[flyinfitz1]

I use a Samsung SSD in my PC and it always works great. Been 3 years now without a problem.

 

[ChriZ]

I have an old OCZ vertex 2 40 GB ssd which uses the Sandforce chip. I realized that with Haswell based motherboards it just won't play along.
Can't see your signature right now (mobile) but if you are using Haswell keep this in mind.
Cheers.

 

[Bidule0hm]

I don't think I'll buy an OCZ anyway, I don't trust this brand that much... I think I'll take a Intel or Sandisk one ;)