Corsair

I had two of those silly USB thumb drives… both died within 2 months. Each drive had a different use case, one was getting disk images written to it directly, and one was just doing normal file storage.

Within 2 months they both just stopped showing up via USB… the controllers died or something. fail.

I’ve had the 120GB Force series for over a year now with no problems. It came in a used laptop and ran fine in there for 2 years before I got my hands on it. I used it in the laptop for a while and then moved it to a desktop and finally pulled it out of there and gave it to a friend.

If you only have Sata II in your machine, these are totally fine. I also own two Crucial M4’s, two Mushkin Chronos and one OCZ Solid 3. The OCZ drive was a nightmare to upgrade the firmware on but the Crucial and Mushkin drives were both really easy. The Corsair was average difficulty but really not that hard.

I always use my SSD’s for the OS, Apps and games. Then I use a regular old hard drive for data. Also Overclock.net has a great guide on how to optimize your SSD.

There hasn’t really been any misinformation (well, other than the suggestion that all Sandforce products are necessarily evil). I have used SSDs for many years (going back to mainframes) and understand the technology pretty well (controller differences, wear leveling, write throttling, write amplification, read disturb, TRIM functionality, process improvements, what NAND flash and multi-level cell really are, etc). For the most part the average consumer doesn’t really care about those details; they want something that works well and is fast and reliable.

There is no need to automatically assume that anyone who is critical of any particular SSD deal is an “ssd-hater” and doesn’t understand how lightning fast a nice new one can make your computer and that thay can have a very long lifetime when used properly.

I’m critical of these particular SSDs for specific reasons, and thus, it is my informed opinion that most non-techies and semi-techies would be better off spending the extra bucks on a new generation SSD that supports SATA III and has a decent warranty and better reliability record.

The really tech-savvy folks can of course make their own determination about the value-proposition offered by these attractively-priced refurbished drives. I’d consider picking up one or two for older less-important systems myself if I knew these definitely had the least-buggy firwmare already loaded.

Now there’s a definitive statement. :-/

Agreed, backups are absolutely essential in all cases. But personally, I also consider re-installing the OS multiple times when your flaky storage device craps out to be a headache. My advice, get something as reliable as you can afford to start with, keep the firmware up to date, and greatly reduce the chances of premature failure. A decent warranty can’t hurt either.

I absolutely love Corsair for their memory and their power supplies. My Voyager put up with some serious abuse over many years. Eventually even snapped the case off and was still able to use it.

They are also top notch with customer service. I had lost my power supply cables and wrote in asking if I could buy replacement. They shipped new ones out immediately, free of charge, even knowing it was my own dumb fault.

I’ve had no problems with Corsair RAM and it’s a reputable brand that I’d recommend in general, but only 30 days of said customer service seems more than a little lacking. If it were 90 I’d give them the benefit of the doubt, but 30 sounds almost like they’re just trying to dump these drives and wash their hands of them.

First, wanted to say I love the idea of Tech.Woot, my home pages already include Microcenter and Newegg so this is pretty dangerous.

That being said, I wanted to jump on this Corsair SSD sale, sure they’re only SATA II, but it’s still way faster than any platter type hard drive, plus the laptops I wanted to upgrade only have Sata II controllers anyway.

The warranty kills it though. I even called Corsair to confirm, and was told on refurbished SSD’s they now only offer a 30-day warranty.

No deal.

These SSD aren’t what you want. But in general SSD drives read and write information faster. Lets say you are playing a videog ame. I will choose WoW as an example since it is widely popular. When you zone into an instance the load time is based on how long it takes ur PC to read the info. If you wait 30-60 seconds using a regular 7200rpm HD with a SSD you generally won’t wait at all. But that is assuming the files you are trying to read are on the SSD. This is one drawback, generally speaking, with basic computer knowledge, the entire program should be written on the SSD. With more advanced computer knowledge, beyond my own, you can apparently dig through games and find certain files to move to the SSD then repath the access for those files so the gameknows where to look. For instance, my friend has all his .MPQ files on his SSD for WoW and D3, then the rest of the files elsewhere, and his load times are next to nothing with a weaker processor and 1/4 the ram I have.

Of course some of this info may be wrong, I do not pretend to be an expert. People here can probably verify or correct me.

Hope I helped a little though.

I have no problem with putting the OS on one of these. Once it’s installed, and periodically thereafter, I image it to a spare smallish HDD (of which I have several since all my HDDs are now upgraded to 1TB). If it dies, I plug in the HDD “spare”, get a replacement SSD, and image it from the HDD. Not really a hassle for a low-criticality personal system.

I have to speak up and say enough with the “it’s only SATA II”. I have a Macbook that only has SATA I, yes you read that right. I have a Crucial M4 in it and it boots in 15 seconds. Everything including the big slow apps like MS Office load instantly. Its as good as having a brand new computer. For day to day use it’s the low access times that make the computer feel fast, and for that you don’t have to limit yourself to SATA III only. By all means buy the best SATA III drive you can get IF you can afford it, but don’t think you are somehow settling massively if you have to buy a SATA II drive.

Unless of course it’s a Refurb Sandforce controller SSD that has a bad Rep. In that case run for the hills… Then again $45 for the cheap one is tempting for throwaway use… Dam.

For full disclosure you should probably reiterate that a Crucial M4 actually is a SATA III drive and uses a Marvell SSD controller (not SandForce).

True, in typical daily use, the difference between a 3Gbps and 6Gbps SATA bus is relatively small (while the difference between a hard drive and any decent SSD, even at 1.5 Gbps, is enormous), BUT you’re still getting newer technology behind that unnecessarily fast bus. Keep in mind that the SATA III standard was finalized in 2009.

AnandTech had a favorable review of the series of disks - Corsair's Force SSD Reviewed: SF-1200 is Very Good

Hard to find information, it appears Corsair has named subsequent models Force GT & Force 3 but retained the same sizes.

Here’s a review on the Sandforce controller itself - Understanding SandForce's SF-1200 & SF-1500, Not All Drives are Equal

The mean time to failures on these drives are kinda stupid high. I wonder what failed on these drives? I don’t think I’d worry about killing the chips with MTF’s like that.

EDIT: Found pages 2 & 3 of the review of the controller. Sounds like Corsair disabled whatever was causing the issues in the release candidate FW that was put out. Issue solved with ver. 3.0.5

So I suppose if the version is 3.0.5 or higher on these drives, you’re peachy. I wonder if Woot can tell us the FW revision?

EDIT 2: Found more info on the FW revisions and reinforcement of the notion that the issue is avoided on these drives : http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=531&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=5

EDIT 3: Found that the above version numbers are internal Sandforce numbers. The acutal Corsair firmware #'s are 1.1, 2.0 & 2.4. Some report problems of upgrading to 2.4, and that it doesn’t fix the S3 state issue.

2.4 firmware - Force Series Firmware 2.4 Update (SATA II DRIVES ONLY) - SSD Firmware Update - Corsair Community

Upgrade issues - Force SATA 2 FW update error (2.0 -> 2.4) - SSD Firmware Update - Corsair Community

FWIW, different controller. The Force 3 / GT / GS use the newer Sata III SF-2200 series controller. The standard Force 3 uses Asynchronous NAND, the GT uses Synchronus, and the GS uses Toggle NAND, which is supposed to be the best.

These older drives use the SF-1200 controller, which is the mainstream version of the SF-1500 Enterprise controller.

I’ve used many drives based on these controllers, including these Corsair drives, OCZ, and Mushkin, performance is fine, don’t let the Sata II throw you off. But as I said before, you’re taking a chance with the warranty.

Ugh, this is way too much information for me. I’ve been thinking about getting a 120gb SSD for the netbook I carry around with me all the time. I can’t imagine SATA III would make any difference, but the fact they’re refurbished concerns me. I’m an unemployed grad student, and this would be a preventative purchase against my HD dying, but I don’t have money to waste.

You lost me at the BS about only Intel making SATA3 controllers.

i would hope less than that! my windows 7 pc with a normal hd, older specs (2.5 ghz dual core) starts in about 15 seconds

I’ve got 10 Corsair SSD’s, none of them failing. I am, however, pretty pissed that my OVERNIGHT shipping hasn’t shipped.

UPDATE : Okay, W00t did refund my shipping, but STILL has not shipped the unit. Now I know why they call us “suckers”.

I’ve used about 6 SSDs in the past 3 years… I have an Intel 1st gen 160GB in my macbook pro, the original 80gb 1st gen intel died on my desktop just after a year. I have two 480GB ssds in my recent server (corsair), along with 2 in my desktop (160gb & 90gb). I can say that when you go SSD, you don’t want to go back.

Regarding SATA2 vs SATA3, yeah, you are slightly (only so slightly) capped with SATA2, since the drive can run faster than that channel, but a good sata2 controller is often better than a bad sata3… In general, you’ll be much happier with SSD over HDD… I ordered a 240GB drive here, now sold out.

My only recommendation would be to get at least a 120GB model for boot/software and at least 160GB if you are doing it for a laptop without a second drive bay.

I’ve noticed the Corsair SSDs getting dumped on all the deal sites lately which should raise the buyer beware flag for anybody looking at them. As noted, these have massive firmware issues on every review site I look at, which explains why they’re being sold as refurbs. They came back for a reason.

Combined with the fact that every read/write shortens their life means you’re rolling the refurb dice harder than usual.

That’s about what it takes my Linux machines with regular drives.

Same thing here. Overnight Shipping has yet to ship. Ordered early 7/17 with a expected delivery date 7/18.