PC Innards

Also note it’s GDDR3 memory.

You never want a REFURBISHED SSD! That usually means the FLASH failed at one point or another. If they are already being refurbished, they have MFG or Design issues. They’re supposed to to have an MTBF of 1 million hours, well that’s about 114 years. That’s 1,000,000 hours divided by 24(hours) = 41,667 days rounded up. Then divide that by 365 = 114 years. So, why are they being REFURBISHED already? I got hard drives made BEFORE SSDs that are still running, with much lower MTBF…

Also, you do not BURN in any drive, SSD doesn’t even apply. I have been an I.T. for over 20 years, NEVER done it, never had a dissatisfied anyone, STILL don’t do it.

First, that’s not bad advice in this case, but not for the reasons you state; mostly because of the 30-day warranty and not-so-great reputation of older Corsair SSDs.

These are most likely drives that were returned because of firmware bugs that caused blue screens and/or made the drive temporarily fail to appear at boot time. There are probably also some that were returned by users who didn’t know how to install them properly, had trouble cloning their hard drives to them, or just changed their minds (perhaps deciding the drive was too small for their needs).

Presumably, a large part of the refurbishment process is to update the drives to the latest firmware so they should already come with the least-buggy firmware available.

The problem with using MTBF numbers to estimate product lifetime is that they are an average across a large population. That’s a critically important factor because it allows for a percentage of early failures to be compensated for by a larger percentage of devices that last much longer.

Also, for products like SSDs that wear out with heavier use, the lifespan would be dramatically shorter if you were to write to the drive constantly (as illustrated in the forum thread I posted a link to earlier).
If you look at Corsair’s own web site you will find:
http://www.corsair.com/blog/force-series-ssd-life-testing/
which says in part:

“…the MTBF time is predicted based off power-on hours. If you simply plugged in a SSD, but never actually transferred any data to it, it would most likely stay functional for over 100 years”

The number you really want for an SSD is TBW (tera-bytes written), which indicates how much data you can expect to be able to write/overwrite to the drive before a high probability of cell failure. For consumer class SSDs it’s often around 36TB.

What a horrible deal on that ram. You can get 2x8gb for $60 or $68 with a $15 MIR and free shipping (inb4 “that second one is 1333 ram”, there’s no real noticeable difference between 1333 and 1600 in real-world applications).

The 60gb SSD isn’t great. It’s SATA II and only has a 60 day warranty. The 90gb is at least a little faster and SATA III… If you look around for deals (check out deals.woot.com), you can usually find 120gb SATA III SSD’s for $65-80 that are new with at least a year warranty.