The reason I always bought Intel SSDs was because they always had Intel controllers, and Intel controllers were always stellar. Intel for years prioritized random access and did it better than anyone else. The 510 series, the first to be released with a non-Intel (Marvell) controller, seemed like such a pointless drive, with worse random performance than the 2 year old X25-M.

The problem is that sequential numbers are always faster and therefore easier to market to people who don't know any better. The 510 served a marketing need, not an engineering one.

I don't follow the market as closely anymore so I don't know if the 520 series makes any more sense, but if we know that Intel was willing to sacrifice random access performance to use a Marvell controller. What will they sacrifice for a Sandforce controller? Reliability?

I have bought six X25Ms in total; all are tremendous performers and give me no problems. The are all G2s and range in age from 1 to 2 years (except for a used 40GB one I bought a month ago).

Unfortunately the Intel 320 series (really the X25-M G3) has had its own reliability issues with a nasty firmware bug that causes it to suddenly report its capacity as 8MB (causing complete data loss).

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/236468/intel_acknowledges_ssd_320_bug_working_on_firmware_upgrade.html

It's ironic that a power failure triggers this problem, since Intel had marketed the 320 as especially resilient to them:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review

Some posters say it can happen without a power failure:

http://communities.intel.com/message/133499

Intel said they found the cause and released a firmware update, but applying it seems to have actually triggered the bug in previously problem-free drives for many posters:

http://communities.intel.com/thread/24121?start=0&tstart=0

Intel has not acknowledged any problems with the fix, nor told anyone which serial numbers were affected. Nobody has reported on the bug since Intel said they fixed it, including Anand.

This issue was enough to convince me to buy something else (even though the 320 series would otherwise have been my first choice) when I had to shop for an SSD last month. I found a used "like new" (according to the SMART data, at least) X25-M G2 on amazon instead.

Interestingly, X25-M G2 prices have held steady ($2/GB or so) and only gone up over the last year. Yeah it's probably because of dwindling supply, but I can't help but suspect that lack of confidence in the 320 series may have contributed to an increase in demand for the G2.

. . . but upon closer inspection it turns out to be Maybelline.

I should have mentioned that it was the Windows version (7.7.1).

I just installed it on your recommendation but can't find any option to disable automatic updates. Any software that requires phoning home every time it runs is a non-starter for me.

Yes, they learned that passing a constitutional amendment involves the participation of the People, who then realize that it's within their power to prevent that amendment (or indeed, revoke it after the fact). Note that when they restricted both guns and drugs soon after, they just ignored the Constitution and left the People out of the loop.

This is true. And while I sometimes have trouble shopping for pants, it's worth being able to make tough decisions and stick with them.

It's that, and the fact that higher upstream traffic causes higher (corresponding) downstream traffic. In fact, manipulating upstream traffic is exactly how linux QoS works. This is a very well-written guide:

http://tomatousb.org/tut:using-tomato-s-qos-system

You should look into getting a router that supports third-party linux firmware with QoS, like Tomato and TomatoUSB (not DDWRT, its QoS GUI (among other things) is long-broken with no fix in sight). Then you can not only cap your upstream traffic, but also give priority to certain traffic (such as DNS, HTTP, IRC, POP, IMAP, etc.) so that your internet connection is always responsive no matter what you're doing.

Don't worry, they will "shaky-cam" the footage in post and overlay the letters REC with a blinking red dot. This will override the audience's minimum quality threshold, replacing it with an appreciation for (literally) gritty realism.

Why is Altavista mentioned in the title and the summary when this slashvertisement has nothing to do with them?