Crucial M4 CT256M4SSD2 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC Internal SSD - $199 free ship

[OILFIELDTRASH]

Has anyone gone to one of these from a 160gb G2? Do you notice much of a difference? Do games load faster or anything? It's really tempting but if you noticed no difference, I'm going to pass. Thanks!

I could put a gen 1 drive in your computer and without benchmarks you'd never know the difference.

I'm still waiting for a test where one reviewer puts a gen 1,gen 2, and the new gen in different computers with the same hardware and see if anyone could tell a difference. We won't see that though because it would cost ssd manufacturers money

 

[cytoSiN]

I could put a gen 1 drive in your computer and without benchmarks you'd never know the difference.

I'm still waiting for a test where one reviewer puts a gen 1,gen 2, and the new gen in different computers with the same hardware and see if anyone could tell a difference. We won't see that though because it would cost ssd manufacturers money

/agree

If you're using a platter drive, this is a MASSIVE upgrade, as someone noted above. But if you're an everyday power user (i.e., you're a typical member of this forum) and you're already using an SSD, there is really no reason to replace it with this one (except epeen maybe?) because you won't see any difference.

That said, this is a FANTASTIC deal, and I'm in for one for my wife's new computer. :thumbsup:

 

[chucky2]

If only Windows 7 Service Pack 2 was out now...

 

[TemjinGold]

Thanks, guys. I mostly ask because (call me weird) when I had my 250gb Vertex 2, my game levels (was playing Wolfenstein at the time) DID load faster and noticeably faster. I imagine this M4 is faster still since it's SATA3.

 

[Pneumothorax]

If I do that I can get away with getting a 120/128GB drive while keeping the HDD for storage. What worries me, though, is the power consumption. The HDD already consumes around 3W during reads. To go along with this upgrade I'll also buy low voltage 1.35V RAM since it's the same price as 1.5V. I think having the HDD + SSD in the system would mean I'd have no gains in battery life or, even worse, it'd be lower.

Sent from my VM670 using Tapatalk 2

Unless you're doing some hefty video editing between the 2 drives, your battery life should be the same or like in my case, improved. I find my mechanical drive stays off much of the time as it's not being used except to pull up data.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Crazy! Right after I already spent $240 on a Mushkin 240GB Chronos Deluxe. Bah.

 

[Lead Butthead]

TD is out of stock, but is listed as in stock at CompUSA.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Unless you're doing some hefty video editing between the 2 drives, your battery life should be the same or like in my case, improved. I find my mechanical drive stays off much of the time as it's not being used except to pull up data.

It's still there idle, doing nothing. My HDD uses 0.9W at idle; I find that's quite significant. Even if it's set to sleep it'll consume some power, and when it needs to start up again because I'm trying to access some media it'll consume 4W while it powers up.

When my laptop uses 4-6W at idle, I think even a 0.5W difference is significant. Heck, with normal use it's 6-8W, and if I can bump that down by even a single watt constantly that means an improvement of 14-20%. If I get 4:30 hours of battery life with the battery at 90%, it could bump my battery life to 5:00-5:15 hours. That's quite significant, I think.

When opening programs a Crucial m4 requires 0.8W, while my Momentus requires 2.5W; when there's no activity the m4 requires 0.6W, while the Momentus requires 0.9W. The RAM is at the same timings and frequency that I have now, but it's an upgrade to 8GB. I don't know the exact amount of power you'd save in a laptop going from 1.50V to 1.35V, but I imagine it'd be at least 0.5W. Just a watt of difference in power consumption on a laptop makes a big difference, and if I have an HDD + SDD running that will pretty much dash all chances I have of saving power, I think. I'll just turn the DVD Drive off except for when I want to use it.

 

[alaricljs]

My Thinkpad spins down the HDD when it's not being used... Since I only use it for backups and media storage if I'm not playing music/movie or writing a backup it's not sucking power. Not that I'm trying to convince you not to go with the low power ram, but does your laptop even support it?

Wow, I think I missed an entire page of posts when I was writing this.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

My Thinkpad spins down the HDD when it's not being used... Since I only use it for backups and media storage if I'm not playing music/movie or writing a backup it's not sucking power. Not that I'm trying to convince you not to go with the low power ram, but does your laptop even support it?

Wow, I think I missed an entire page of posts when I was writing this.

Sandy Bridge and the HM65 chipset support low-voltage RAM, I'm pretty sure.

The thing is, even if the HDD is in sleep, it's still consuming a bit of power. And if for whatever reason, it needs to wake up from sleep, it'll consume 4W when powering up along with 0.8W while idle.

I think 256GB is a pretty good sweet spot for a laptop. Right now I have almost everything I need in my laptop and more and I'm using 190GB. Converted to binary and accounting for formatting, a 256GB SSD will have an actual usable capacity of 232GB. That leaves me with 40GB to spare, not taking into account I have more than 10GB of stuff I don't need in my HDD which I haven't bothered deleting.

 

[chinkgai]

@lol_wut_axel

how do you know how much power each device is consuming? what program are you using?

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

@lol_wut_axel

how do you know how much power each device is consuming? what program are you using?

ThinkPad Power Manager. Review sites like StorageReviews also measure how much power the HDDs and SSDs they test consume.

 

[bleucharm28]

Sold out!

 

[bryanW1995]

Just got my 2 m4's in earlier today. Not quite as fast as I had hoped in sequentials, but apparently the g2 got jealous, my old windows installation started having issues, etc etc, so I settled for this:

 

[Wyndru]

I feel like SSD drives will definitely be down to the .75 or .5 by Christmas time.

This, no one should be upset missing these deals, these prices are plummeting. I'm not sure why, but I'm not upset about it. It's about time ssd's got to a reasonable price.

 

[Craig234]

This, no one should be upset missing these deals, these prices are plummeting. I'm not sure why, but I'm not upset about it. It's about time ssd's got to a reasonable price.

It does feel like they're on the way down. I guess we don't have any good indicators to support that other than speculation?

 

[turn_pike]

News article from a couple of days ago at Xbitlabs
"As Latest SSD Prices Hit $0.65 per Gigabyte, OCZ Forecasts Further Drop of Costs."

Cnet article from about a week ago on the impending SSD price war

I think this is merely the first salvo in the great war.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storag...byte_OCZ_Forecasts_Further_Drop_of_Costs.html

 

[VirtualLarry]

"As Latest SSD Prices Hit $0.65 per Gigabyte, OCZ Forecasts Further Drop of Costs."

OCZ talking about 10nm NAND this year? Who's makin that? And why haven't we seen an AT article on that?

 

[ViRGE]

This isn't P&N, kids. Keep it to deals on SSDs.

edit: I moved all the political claptrap out of the thread so that others won't have to wade through it to read about the deal..
admin allisolm

 

[bryanW1995]

woot! my very first SSD I can't wait, i got 2 and Im gona raid 0 them babies.

I was going to get Samsung 256, but it was sold by the time I got home.

199.99 / 256g = 0.78 cent (I'll call it good, I've waited long enough)

After I updated to the latest firmware, I got my reads/writes up where I expected them to be. I'll post the update tonight.

The difference between this 2 x 256gb setup and my old 80 gb x25m g2 is MUCH more noticeable than I expected. And even at the price I paid ($215 each), it was still cheaper for each one than the price I paid on BF 2009 for the 80gb g2 ($220). $2.75/gb down to the current $.78/gb is extremely impressive, even more so when you consider that ssd's are now getting large enough to allow use as the ONLY drive(s) in a system rather than just as the OS/vital programs setup that they have been in the past.

On an even more positive note, I now have a good paperweight (my old 640gb wd blue).

 

[child of wonder]

Just got one for $189 shipped at Buy.com by using the $10 off first time customer coupon.

http://www.buy.com/retail/coupon.asp?prid=82955137&&

 

[lehtv]

I paid £200 for my Vertex 2 120GB a bit over a year ago

 

[TemjinGold]

After I updated to the latest firmware, I got my reads/writes up where I expected them to be. I'll post the update tonight.

The difference between this 2 x 256gb setup and my old 80 gb x25m g2 is MUCH more noticeable than I expected. And even at the price I paid ($215 each), it was still cheaper for each one than the price I paid on BF 2009 for the 80gb g2 ($220). $2.75/gb down to the current $.78/gb is extremely impressive, even more so when you consider that ssd's are now getting large enough to allow use as the ONLY drive(s) in a system rather than just as the OS/vital programs setup that they have been in the past.

On an even more positive note, I now have a good paperweight (my old 640gb wd blue).

Now you're tempting me. Do you think I will notice between my 160 g2 and a single M4 256?

 

[bryanW1995]

I benchmarked the m4's one at a time with As-ssd before RAIDing them together, I'll post that info as well. I'm glad I did, because I was accidentally using one of the m4's with an sata II port originally.

I think that you'll probably still notice the jump up to a single m4, but keep in mind that your 160gb g2 is faster than my 80gb g2. Plus, I was running SRT with 25% of my drive, so it was actually extremely slow even for an older ssd. And I didn't install windows onto the m4's individually, so I'm only guessing at how it would be on a single drive. Anyway, I've got the m4's individually, one of which I inadvertently measured on sata II as mentioned, plus I have them both with the 0309 firmware in RAID-0 that they shipped with and with the latest firmware in RAID 0. I should be home in 30 minutes or so, I'll throw all of the screenies up then.

I will say this for sure. Regardless of what the benchmarks say, and the benchmarks look great btw, I am even more impressed than I expected to be. I am absolutely just as happy with this ssd upgrade as I was with my original g2 80gb upgrade, and that was the best/most valuable single upgrade I had made in probably a decade. You might go to buy.com and grab the single m4 for $190, then if you decide that you want more oomph you could always grab a 2nd one to really ramp things up. Keep in mind the amount that you can sell your x25m for OR buy another one for, however, because 2 x x25m 160gb in RAID 0 would probably be faster than a single 256gb m4 and also have more space. My 80gb drive was just too small for it to be worth it for me to RAID a couple together.

 

[TemjinGold]

Thanks for the detailed response. So despite one being Sata 2 and the other being Sata 3, 2x my drive would be faster than 1x M4?