I Think My SSD Has Gone to Greener Patures

I have an OCZ Agility III that's provided faithful service for three years, but yesterday I was running Windows Update and left for work. When I got home, I had the no OS found, press any key to reboot message on the screen. I tossed in my Windows disc disc and it couldn't see the drive. I'm assuming it bit the dust, but before I replace it, I was wondering if there's anything I could check before spending any money? I'll try to re-seat the cable later today and see if that helps.

If I do buy a new drive, I was thinking about getting the best SSD I can for my main desktop, then moving the drive from my main desktop, also an Agility III, into the one with the dead drive as it's only a HTPC and doesn't require the best performance. I only need a 120GB drive, so what's my options for the best performing drive available right now? I've head good things about the M500, but haven't kept up on it. Thanks for any help.

 

The best bets right now are the Samsung 850 Pro and the SanDisk Extreme Pro for best performance.

The M550 is preferred over the M500 for much less cost. The Crucial MX100 is also a good option for good performance at low cost.


No matter what model/brand you decide on; 120GB is not in any recommended list. 240/250GB or higher is what you should be looking at for best performance (still).


You may want to leave the dead drive at the BIOS screen for about an hour or so and then turn off, remove the power completely (unplug from the wall and/or remove battery) and wait another hour before you try to boot again.


Good luck.

 

Have you tried your unresponsive drive in another system with a new cable? Its difficult to troubleshoot an SSD since they don't make any noise to tell you if they're working correctly or not.

I've got a Kingston HyperX SSD in our desktop and a Samsung 840 PRO in my Alienware. There has been good things also being said about Intel's 730 Series SSDs.

 

Well, the Agility III was sitting plugged in for like 10 hours and then shut off. I've not tried it yet today, but will later tonight.

Hmmm.... The MX100 is $98 today for the 256GB at NewEgg. Toss in free ShopRunner from my American Express card and I'll have it Wednesday. How much of a noticeable difference is it going to make? I've always been pretty happy with my Agility IIIs. Photoshop, which is known laggard, always pops right open on them. Given that I paid $50 a piece for them three years ago, I guess I can't complain. Thanks for the replies.

 

I think you'll be happy with it.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

If you're not looking to spend too much, MX100 is an excellent buy at that price tag...and I'd definitely take it over M500.

 

Agility III = SandForce-based OCZ drive = 99.9% chance of being irrecoverable, unfortunately.

I've got the 730 in the machine that I'm typing on right now and would highly recommend it to anyone not looking for the necessarily fastest but definitely one of the most stable and consistent performers in the current SSD market.

My $0.02 only...

 

How so? I've used a fair number of SSDs, though they tended to be smaller as I only needed them as boot drives, and they've all seemed pretty fast to me. Like I said, my Agility IIIs are quick. I see the people debating the finer points of this SSD over the next. It begs the question, how much of a real world difference can it make given that I was already satisfied with my Agility III, other than the it dying part?

 

Is your desktop running at SATA II or SATA III ?

Agility was not considered to be a slouchy drive, quite the opposite. What you use the SSD for can also make a world of difference, at least in my opinion.

 

On a side note you don't have a recent smart status on the agility or some kind of assessment on the drive to know how it died do you?

I have a crucial m4 128gb that has been sitting in a dell estata casing hooked upto my AW that I am planning to install into the Acer AOD 150 and making multiple partitions on

 

In most cases, SF-based drives die without any type of warning. They either freeze the system and are gone on reboot, or just go "poof" right into the thin air.

One of my favourite SSDs of all times - M4 aka Micron C400 - since I've deployed boxes of them with absolutely zero issues of any kind. Definitely not the fastest SSD around - not even within its own generation - but one of the very few that I trust my own data with...not that the said data doesn't exist in multiple backups, but nevertheless...

 

It's a Dell Optiplex 7010 with i7-3770 and 8GB memory, so I believe it's SATA III. It seemed to offer about the same performance as my two HTPC, also Agility IIIs, which are SATA II and run AMD Athlon 600e CPUs/4GB memory.

 

^^^^^^^

It's a new enough platform to warrant a decent drive. A $98 256GB version of MX100 would fit that bill in my opinion...

 

Yeah, but if I buy it, my American Express bill is going to be like $2k this month. They're going to have a hitman looking for me. Maybe before I do anything I'll go look at to see if I can get it working. That don't cost me a thing.

 

Fair enough.

Good luck. Seriously.

 

It's official, it's toast. I tried a new cable, but the Windows installer disc failed while writing files to the drive. It was doing this odd thing too where when you made a new partition on the drive for Windows, it made the system partition, but two other 0MB partitions too. I don't know what that means, but MX100 here I come.

 

ZaZ, it is sad to here the drive is really dead. You were doing data backups, right?

Hope you have better luck with the new one!

 

No need for data backups on any of my SSDs. They're just OS partitions and any real data is on the platter drives, and backed up. Like I said, I can't really complain as I paid $50 for it three years ago and offered good performance until it died.

 

So, I finally got the MX100 installed and put the OS on. It seems a bit faster here and there like it boots slightly faster and Photoshop opens a little faster, but I'm not sure that's worth $100.

 

That was rather my impression when switching from a Intel 320 from 3 years ago to the MX-100. For the stuff that I already had on the SSD, it's really awfully similar in performance. Technically the sequential speeds are much faster, but I can't tell a real-world difference.

For me the bigger thing was being able to put more stuff on the SSD. So some of what was on the hard drive before got promoted. Whether it was worth it in the end... still deciding. Although if I were going to do it again, I'd either still go with the MX-100, or just stick with the older Intel one + hard drives. You didn't have quite as much flexibility since your drive had gone kaput.

 

Yeah, there is little need for most users to upgrade their SSD except for possibly needing more storage space. The performance difference looks great on paper and benches, but in reality the difference is hardly noticeable.