crucial m4 vs vertex 3 ... not such a whitewash after all!?

[c.ruel]

Among the previous generation of SSDs the c300 was king (for read speeds at least anyway). Now the successor to this drive the m4 is better than the c300 but the sandforce controller improved dramatically as well between the current generation and the last one. So the thinking was at least I thought, that the vertex 3 vs m4 battle was a no-brainer ... get a vertex 3.

But I have been having a look around at websites and I have noticed that it seems that ocz aren't doing a 60gb version of their drive. Also comparing the prices of the vertex 3 drives to the m4 ones the m4 ones are significantly cheaper in fact the m4 drives are only about a £10 more or so across the range over the c300s.

Looking at scan the pre order price for the 256gb m4 is £360 odd ... loads but then the price for the 240gb vertex 3 is £480!, so you get 16gb less and and it still costs 120 quid more.

Just interested to know what people in the market for a new SSD thought. Are you going to go for one of the new generation of SSDs ... if so which one and if you are going for the previous generation what is your rationale?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The main issue is that the latest flash chips have less read/write cycles than the older ones.
Hence this is why the latest drives will be around the same price as the old ones as more non-useable space has to allocated.

I would probably still have a look at a Crucial C300. If I wasn't so skint I would have got the 64GB one when it was on Ebuyer for around £86 until relatively recently.

[c.ruel]

If the c300 and m4 were the same price though (not likely i know) you would still go for the m4 though right!?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

If the c300 and m4 were the same price though (not likely i know) you would still go for the m4 though right!?

The drop in lifespan is quite dramatic with the newer 25NM flash chips. If I bought an SSD I would expect it to last four to five years reliably like my hard drives.

I just saw this article:

http://www.ssdfreaks.com/content/552...m-nand-in-ssds

I really hope that the newer controllers will help improve the lifespan of these drives!

[DanceswithUnix]

Anandtech looked into flash wear rates recently, and came to the conclusion that there was nothing to worry about.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4159/o...t-sf2500-ssd/2

To distill that page, the worst usage pattern they had was 7.7GB per day written to the drive, using 10 cycles of the flash out of 3000 in 8 months. I make that about 200 years of use?

OK that is a 256GB drive, but still if it was a 64GB drive that would still only be 40 cycles out of 3000.

On top of that, the 3000 cycles is supposed to be very conservative.

[c.ruel]

Does make me want to buy a larger drive though to have my back covered even though i don't do that much writing.

[DanceswithUnix]

If you write all your bulk rubbish onto a cheap & big conventional drive, how much traffic do you have left for the system drive?

What I would like to know is if the Smart monitoring on them gives a decent warning when the error correction starts ramping up, so you have just a few months to back up to another drive. I could live with that