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Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

Terrible title, terrible science, terrible conclusion.

Spoiler: He only tested these five drives, only Intel survived, so if they are your candidates, apply his conclusion:

    Crucial M4
    Toshiba THNSNH060GCS 60gb
    Innodisk 3MP Sata Slim
    OCZ Vertex 32gb
    Intel 320 and S3500

Notably missing is the Intel runner-up Samsung and probably others i'm not aware of, as well as other models.

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The author mentions that he only evaluated drives that have some form of power loss protection - doing some quick searching around, I couldn't find any Samsung drives in the given price range that claimed to have that.

Did I miss an appropriate Samsung drive in my quick searches? Or is there reason to suspect that a Samsung drive that doesn't claim to have power loss protection would nonetheless handle this case better than the non-Intel drives that did make that claim? Because if not, then I don't think not evaluating Samsung drives compromises the results in any way.

The Samsung SM843T has power loss protection, among other things, and is priced really competitively to the Intel S3500.

A little harsh, don't you think? I'd say it's still useful to have 5 data points than 0.

I'd have been gentle if his conclusion had included a measure of humbleness and at least kind of approached being somewhat accurate. :)

And where was the "terrible science"? Requiring "humbleness" in posts seems to only apply to other people's posts, apparently.

The conclusion "buy intel" makes no sense. He tested far too few drives to make that conclusion, and many potentially safe alternatives went untested. Not to mention the fact that not all intel drives apparently are safe.

So yeah; it's unfortunately bogus science - he's drawing invalid conclusions from a far too small sample.

Terrible science = small, restricted subject population, from which an ironclad blanket conclusion is made, that covers the entire population.

One of the restrictions is price, which makes little sense in concluding so strongly for a measure involving quality. Not to mention that only a single specimen of a single model of each brand was tested. The top-voted comment in the thread points out some Intel models that don't have supercapacitors in them.

Already the article is updated with a couple of other drives to test. I guess that wasn't "End of discussion" after all...

He explained why he chose those 5. Only those 5 advertised certain features he needed.

The article wasn't written by a guy claiming to do a comprehensive survey of every SSD on the market.

He tested a bunch of equipment, and was kind enough to share his methods and results. Lot of people/companies don't do that.

He's not misrepresenting what he did, and he provided some valuable data, so kudos to him.

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