Quote Originally Posted by Animeniax View Post
That sucks to hear your new SSD has been such a terrible experience, though hopefully a worthwhile learning experience and maybe bonding with your brother.

I went with a smaller no-name brand and it's been great success.
It turns out my SSD problem was caused by a 4GB piece of bad RAM. Ever since I upgraded my system with the (then new) CPU, mobo and DDR3 RAM, I've noticed that the computer was less stable than my old C2D rig. The most common things to crash were display drivers, firefox, Explorer etc. I've had Steam games tell me that the files did not maintain their integrity and needed to be redownloaded a few times in the past. I never tried troubleshooting it seriously because no one had any compatible parts for me to swap and confirm with. Only recently did my brother buy some PC parts - and even then the only thing swappable was the DDR3.

Turns out the SSD integrity check was much more stringent than even Memtest86+ or Windows Memory Diagnostic tool (which I have used in the past - and all results were satisfactory). It wasn't just the test result of the SSD integrity check that was a problem, but the system experienced the problems that I stated in the previous post as well.

Even that test wasn't 100% reliable though, so I ran in circles a bit during all this and needed to run the Integrity check multiple times on each configuration to be reasonably sure if something was stable or not. And since the full data integrity scan writes random data to the SSD and reads it back for checking, I think I would have written 10TB to the drive since last week.

34nm flash has a p/e cycle of 5000 or so I've read, so the current writes aren't too scary in the overall write endurance of some 1160TB or so.