Which ssd?

[eUphoria]

Ordered a 256gb M4 at the weekend - I'll post up my thoughts but I was damn impressed with the corsair one that I bought last year, it turned a relic of an old laptop into quite a useable machine.

I paid £154 through amazon for mine, which seemed pretty good value at current prices

[Rookie1986]

Price is good and its a really good SSD

[CK1]

Looking online there seems to be two flavours of the Crucial M4 128GB, brackets and transfer cables aside: -

Crucial CT128M4SSD2

and

Crucial CT128M4SSD1

What the difference? I guess one is newer but which should I go for?

[iranu]

Looking online there seems to be two flavours of the Crucial M4 128GB, brackets and transfer cables aside: -

Crucial CT128M4SSD2

and

Crucial CT128M4SSD1

What the difference? I guess one is newer but which should I go for?

SSD1 is the 7mm slim one. SSD2 is the normal sized casing. I doubt it matters in terms of performance.

[eUphoria]

Just installed a crucial 256gb M4 that I bought from amazon @ £154 - seems a good price to me

[blokeinkent]

Thanks for the info guys. With prices starting to tumble I'm going to need to make the change soon. I reinstalled my Win 7 system the other week as it was grinding to a halt. Thought the reinstall would really speed things up but to be honest it's only made a little difference. I'm just wondering now whether to get an older SataII model, or newer and run it on my aging mobo until I get a chance to upgrade that as well. It just seems whenever picking a drive the old nugget pops into the brain "oh look, £10 more and I can get, oooh another £10 will get me....."

[Bo Pedersen]

Hi Guys
here is my tuppence from my experience with SSD's

there is a great deal of aggressive pricing going on at the moment. Of course new chipsets are available all the time, but the one that seems to have most of the offers is Sandforce, which can be found in Crucial OCZ etc etc.
There was a problem with sandforce last year, which led to many failures, and a hit on reputation for some manufacturers including OCZ.

As usual the internet is rife with complaints, and sparing on praise, but this happens to anything on forums.
I have installed 4 OCZ drives in the past 3 weeks and they are all functioning fine, just remember to check all your settings, and relax, you have a 3 year warranty from most suppliers.
I have previously installed Crucial and Kingston ssd's.

as for the read/write speeds, these are stated under test conditions and not under everyday use. Let me tell you that these drives are fast, it's pretty much the biggest upgrade since dual banking ddr

by the way I am not a big ocz supporter, lets just say 2 ocz stealthe xtreme power supplies are bricks, that's how I learned about 80plus!

[Agent]

just remember to check all your settings, and relax, you have a 3 year warranty from most suppliers.

It's all well and good being able to get them replaced, but you're not taking into account downtime, potential loss of data and wasted time from installing one of these shoddy drives.

As I've posted in another thread here, AnAndTech are still having issues with them on certain systems. AnAnd are pretty much the definitive source when it comes to SSDs since their mainstream release - if they are having issues, there is an issue. If it affects you or not is a different matter, but why risk it for the sake of a few quid?

It's also great that you've had no issues, but you've installed 4 that have been operating for 3 weeks. It's not a useful sample size at all when you consider the thousands of people that have had issues, with some of us having to replace entire labs of the blinking things

I've mentioned this before and others have echoed it too:

I mean this is the most constructive way guys, but HEXUS is getting terrible for this: Someone posts a major underlying issue with something, with links backing this up and thousands (literally) of results with a simple Google search, then people start to post "but mine works fine".

I'm glad it does, I wouldn't wish faulty hardware on anyone - certainly not something with data on, but common guys, it's hardly a reliable sample size. Visit the OCZ forums if you want to see how many people this has and still does cause issues for. Data loss is a serious issue and not something we should underplay.

I had to replace a lab with 40 of the sodding things . Believe me, messing about with data on such a scale is no fun.

I hope that doesn't come across as rude Bo Pedersen, I mean what I say with the utmost respect, but many of us have had serious and what feels like endless issues with Sandforce based drives.

Given their history, I can't think of a single reason not to go with a Crucial M4 or a Sammy 830.

Regards

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You had to replace 40 drives! That is annoying!

[iranu]

Hi Guys
here is my tuppence from my experience with SSD's

there is a great deal of aggressive pricing going on at the moment. Of course new chipsets are available all the time, but the one that seems to have most of the offers is Sandforce, which can be found in Crucial OCZ etc etc.
There was a problem with sandforce last year, which led to many failures, and a hit on reputation for some manufacturers including OCZ.

As usual the internet is rife with complaints, and sparing on praise, but this happens to anything on forums.
I have installed 4 OCZ drives in the past 3 weeks and they are all functioning fine, just remember to check all your settings, and relax, you have a 3 year warranty from most suppliers.
I have previously installed Crucial and Kingston ssd's.

as for the read/write speeds, these are stated under test conditions and not under everyday use. Let me tell you that these drives are fast, it's pretty much the biggest upgrade since dual banking ddr

by the way I am not a big ocz supporter, lets just say 2 ocz stealthe xtreme power supplies are bricks, that's how I learned about 80plus!

Crucial M4 does not use a sandforce controller, they use a Marvell one. Sandforce controllers are fine if they are paired with decent NAND - see Sandisk Extreme.

I wouldn't want to give my money to OCZ even if all the problems have been sorted with the sandforce controller. The failure rates for OCZ drives is markedly higher than other manufacturers. Couple this with the cock ups on their drives last year then I don't trust them one inch. You can see how the price of the Vertex 4 has fallen through the floor due to them not selling as word gets around about OCZ. I wouldn't touch OCZ with a bargepole. There are far better, faster and more reliable drives on the market for the same and less money.

http://translate.googleusercontent.c...2UG3Fp934arZOA

Crucial M4, Intel 320/520, Samsung 830, Sandisk Extreme and Plextor drives are way more reliable. You really can't beat the M4 128Gb for price, reliability and performance.

[Agent]

You had to replace 40 drives! That is annoying!

Swapping the drives out wasn't an issue - it was mirroring the data to a new drive and ensuring the entire lab worked fine for the next day that was the problem (time)!

Lesson learnt though: It was mostly my fault for jumping on a new tech so quickly. We should have used older, but known reliable drives given the nature of their use.

[Bambooz]

I wouldn't want to give my money to OCZ even if all the problems have been sorted with the sandforce controller. The failure rates for OCZ drives is markedly higher than other manufacturers. Couple this with the cock ups on their drives last year then I don't trust them one inch. You can see how the price of the Vertex 4 has fallen through the floor due to them not selling as word gets around about OCZ. I wouldn't touch OCZ with a bargepole. There are far better, faster and more reliable drives on the market for the same and less money.

To top it all off, OCZ was also entangled in a scandal regarding fake mass user ratings on the price comparison site "Geizhals.at" recently. The site itself is available in multiple countries under different names (geizhals.at, geizhals.de, skinflint.co.uk, cenowarka.pl)

crappy google translation
http://translate.google.com/translat...r-1441804.html

To sum it up: Someone from OCZ made a ton of fake accounts, gave OCZ SSDs the best possible ratings, while voting for all competitors with the worst possible ones. OCZ obviously denied having anything to do with it later on in an official statement.

Pathetic is hardly the word for OCZ..

[CommissarTommy]

The Samsung 830 is also a good drive (128GB under £100 at Scan.co.uk)

[marshalex]

The Samsung 830 is also a good drive (128GB under £100 at Scan.co.uk)

amazon have the 256gb for £140 (if you're prepared to wait for them to get stock). i ordered my samsung 830 last week, hopefully get it at somepoint this week!

[Bo Pedersen]

Hi Guys

I really feel for you, having such bad experiences with OCZ, I hated them for quite a while after my supposed 700w psu could only handle 500w.

Like many I am on a very tight budget, so a few quid to me is a bigger difference

I use Acronis Trueimage to back up my SSD which takes about 5 mins, so I do this regular, just in case.

and Agent I feel for you with your mass failures, but I have to ask why you would use consumer drives on such a setup.

By the way all the installed drives are still performing fine, we are all BF3 players so you can imagine the stick they get, along with the testing and benchmarking we are doing for one-up manship!

Computex has seen more chipsets come onto the market, and drive prices are continuing to drop, and I feel Sanforce will now be retired in favour of newer chipsets that have not lost trust.....yet

[Agent]

and Agent I feel for you with your mass failures, but I have to ask why you would use consumer drives on such a setup.

No excuses - we shouldn't have.

We jumped on a technology that was unproven at the time in at attempt to make things better all around. Ironically it wouldn't have been an issue if it was almost any other SSD chipset, but you live and learn.