PNY 480GB EP7011 Enterprise SSD 2.5" SATA III

I suggest anyone interested in this SSD do a little homework first. There are a number of SSD’s this size or larger from highly rated manufacturers like Crucial and Kingston selling for $159 & $142 respectively. PNY is a well known brand however their reviews don’t reflect their reliability being equal to that of numerous others.

If you’ve never owned an SSD before make sure to read a few articles online re: changes you’ll want to make to your system after installing one. You’ll find some setting changes you’ll want to make and processes you’ll want to limit, like defragging, etc. Just an FYI.

Yeah, though obviously well intended, most of this is actually not true. PNY makes some excellent drives with respectable reviews. This is an enterprise level drive with longer life and reliability. It is not the fastest and there are certainly better drives for the home user but if your looking for an ssd with a longer life this may not be a bad choice.
as for the “changes” you’ll want to make once you are using an ssd. There really, really aren’t any. Here’s a link explaining it. https://www.howtogeek.com/256859/dont-waste-time-optimizing-your-ssd-windows-knows-what-its-doing/

Good luck all. Sorry to poo on your parade willyone.

I don’t understand how to tell what’s faster or not. They’re all sata III at 6gbs, and they almost all say they read/write at 550 or so, how do you tell?

Define longer life and reliability. Is it number of total NAND writes or MTBF due to controller’s/something else screw up that is not anticipated by SMART?

SSD’s are fast, Really fast but bring a whole different issue(s) when it comes to drive storage. Both INITIAL posts are mostly correct but ANYONE who uses a SSD, DO BACK UPS and then some. The ram on these devices do wear out and/or get corrupted and can really rain on your parade. I recently put a 500gb PNY drive in a media server that records then converts my media. Was hoping to squeeze a little more performance out of it but even w/32gb of ram and a pretty fast Xeon processor, didn’t notice much more speed. But during the process, I found a few things you SHOULD NOT DO to/with a SSD:

  1. Don’t Defragment
  2. Don’t Wipe
  3. Don’t Use Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Disable TRIM
  4. Don’t Fill Them to Capacity
  5. Don’t Write Constantly To Them (good reason to move your page file to another drive or not have one at all)
    6.Don’t Store Large, Infrequently Accessed Files

Source

Not going to debate the pros/cons of SSD’s. They have their place and MAYBE someday, they will develop memory modules that can handle the duty that a HDD provides. One can stick a in expensive SSD drive in their machine and only put thier OS on it, but make sure you supplement with a 7200RPM or better w/lots of built in cache for your data drive and make sure windows is putting any page file on the HDD. You will get longer life out of your SSD w/o loosing too much speed and you will save yourself early failure and/or having to restore. Just always make sure you have a good backup (I suggest using the free version of TODO backup and make a WinPE boot disk/usb).

If you’re worried about SSD write exhaustion, don’t be. SSDs will take thousands of times more writes than a consumer user can plausibly generate before they die.

You can get around accidentally filling a SSD to its capacity by leaving 10GB, or so, out when you partition it. Usually the rule of thumb is 10%, but I don’t think I’d leave 48GB doing nothing. Maybe 20GB…

Very true of modern SSDs though only a few years ago, that definitely wasn’t the case, I have an 500gb M500 that was beaten to a pulp (performance degradation) by a virtualization workload while my phison based SSD kept on chugging. This is a weird case, if you’re looking for enterprise level, you’re probably going to run something other than windows, an that advice on Windows managing their SSD better won’t apply. But then if you’re running on a windows single user desktop, you’ll definitely get better bang for the buck with a mainstream drive that can write much faster, for smaller bursts. I mean even in enterprise, Seagate’s (sand force controller) market share is pretty crap so I’d probably look for a different vendor if I needed enterprise features. Not sure who’s the target audience for this.

I don’t consider a 3 year warranty much of an enterprise-level of coverage. The Samsung PRO 850 series come with a 10 year warranty and a 5 year warranty on most of the others in the EVO line.

3 year is pretty standard in the enterprise - but you’re also going to be using enterprise SSD’s in a drive shelf for a large array running RAID and they’ll have a new one to you in the middle of the night if you need it (NetApp, 3Par, etc…)
By year 4 in a large enterprise, you’re going to be doing a tech refresh anyway and moving your 3 year stuff out of production use to like Dev or something, or writing it off.

As a side thing, if you’re thinking of buying an Enterprise grade SSD for home use, don’t. They’re reliable but they are FAR more sensitive to errors and will brick themselves if internal thresholds are reached.

They’re meant for a setup where you have multiple of these in an array and if one fails, you just replace it; you don’t spend time troubleshooting.