Fairwell HD, I knew thee well!

[GreyGeek]

The final page of a TechReport about SSD's is here. You were right, oshunluvr, the Samsung 840 pro is the best.

Edit:However, it is outside my budget range and I don't trust the cheap ones which, according to a user survey I read, have failure rates above 15% within the first six months. Also, they seem to fail without warning, making daily backups to external drives mandatory.

[dibl]

... and I don't trust the cheap ones which, according to a user survey I read, have failure rates above 15% within the first six months. Also, they seem to fail without warning, making daily backups to external drives mandatory.

Right you are! My OCZ PCI-e SSD is not recognized by a number of motherboards, including both of the Asus boards that I've mounted it on, as a bootable device. Therefore it has always been necessary to have another bootable drive of some kind carry the /boot partition. My first bright idea was a small, cheap Kingston SATA interface SSD -- if I remember it was only 16 GB. What a disappointing day it was when that one died and I couldn't boot my system. I don't think it lasted more than two years, and I even used ext2 for the filesystem to preclude journalling on it. Since then, /boot has been on a partition on a WD hdd, which I expect will live longer than I do.

[GreyGeek]

Right you are! My OCZ PCI-e SSD is not recognized by a number of motherboards, including both of the Asus boards that I've mounted it on, as a bootable device. Therefore it has always been necessary to have another bootable drive of some kind carry the /boot partition. My first bright idea was a small, cheap Kingston SATA interface SSD -- if I remember it was only 16 GB. What a disappointing day it was when that one died and I couldn't boot my system. I don't think it lasted more than two years, and I even used ext2 for the filesystem to preclude journalling on it. Since then, /boot has been on a partition on a WD hdd, which I expect will live longer than I do.

The most astounding thing to me is that Amazon is offering USED SSDs for sale! Since "Pre-fail" and "Old Age" indicators for smartd mean absolutely nothing, the only thing one could count on is the sector reallocation error count. However, I doubt seriously that the vendor would RMA the used drive if it has a couple thousand reallocation errors because of "as is" on used equipment.

IF I were independently wealthy, or a recent Powerball winner, I'd buy a brand new monster gaming machine with 1TB SSDs and a couple 1TB Samsung 840 Pro SSD's and use Btrfs to send & receive incremental updates to the second SSD. Dream, dream, dream.
By the time I get my wife's two medical catastrophes paid off my grandkids will be out of high school and I'll be too senile to remember how to play Minecraft and my 5 year old laptop will probably outlive me too!

[dibl]

Newegg has Samsung 840 PRO 256 GB for $300 and free shipping.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...9SIAADF3ZD3050

[GreyGeek]

Newegg has Samsung 840 PRO 256 GB for $300 and free shipping.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...9SIAADF3ZD3050

I saw that. Checked it out after I saw Amazon's third party offerings which ranged from $225 to $400 for the 256GB drive. Amazon third party vendors tend to be Chinese firms hiding behind American sounding names. I also noticed that when one compares Amazon's "Prime" price it usually equals 3rd party vendor price PLUS shipping, so "Prime" isn't always prime. That's why I canceled my prime membership. However, until I get my wife's medical bills paid down I won't be buying equipment that expensive, especially when it can suffer from sudden death syndrome a day after the warranty expires.