Questioning my purchase of 512 GB Crucial M4

[abbcccus]

I put a Kingston V100 in a friend's MacBook Pro that's essentially identical to the one OP has (I think her CPU is clocked a little lower), and she was completely blown away by it. She tells me that it's faster than the i5 MacBook Pro she bought when she thought her C2D machine was dead. My just purchased at the time G4 went into it first to make sure the machine was working, but then I stuck the V100 in it as I had bigger plans for the G4. I timed them both to see if there was any difference, but they both booted from power button push to desktop in 17 seconds.

 

[BFG10K]

Again, it depends upon the games. NWN2 has frequent and annoying level loads. And those are all extremely old games. What "intel" ssd is being used?

Those games have the longest load times in my library. Also Stalker and Hard Reset have release dates of 2010 and 2011 respectively. That’s not “extremely old”.

Not to mention that the age of the data is absolutely irrelevant. I’ll bet most of Windows 7’s files are over 3 years old since it shipped in 2009. Does that mean SSD tests on it are irrelevant?

The Intel was a 120GB 320 series and the results were lifted from my review here: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2231417

 

[bryanW1995]

How much faster would an SATA 6 gb/s ssd be?

Stalker and Hard Reset might be relatively recent, but the others are not. And my statement "it depends upon the games" still stands. Civ5 and nwn2 are just 2 that I personally have experienced long/annoying load times on hdd's.

 

[BFG10K]

How much faster would an SATA 6 gb/s ssd be?

Little to none from what I’ve seen. Here you’re looking at a difference of about 1 second between a 320 and the “big guns”.

Game load times are never solely bottlenecked by I/O, anyway. Some have more I/O than others, but there are always other dependencies. The CPU, RAM and graphics driver also play a part.

You have to decompress data files (CPU), load content onto the GPU (GPU driver). And if content is being reloaded from the disk cache, your RAM speed can influence that.

Stalker and Hard Reset might be relatively recent, but the others are not. And my statement "it depends upon the games" still stands. Civ5 and nwn2 are just 2 that I personally have experienced long/annoying load times on hdd's.

Again, if something’s I/O bound then it doesn’t matter how old the data is. If I run a database from the 1980s it’s still going to be I/O bound.

You can see from my results that there are indeed significant gains from the SSD compared to the Black in some games. But I’m not arguing that at all.

My argument here is two-fold:

• I only see that gain the first time I load that level. Subsequent reloads are not I/O bound as the data comes from the RAM, removing the storage device from the equation.

• It’s completely impractical to buy an SSD that can hold my entire gaming library, a library that will only grow with time. The time I spend manipulating the smaller storage unit erodes any level savings I get.

Couple this with their extreme cost and they’re just not worth it IMO. When I can get a 1TB SSD for the same price as a Raptor I’ll take another look at them again. But I don’t foresee that happening for another 5-10 years.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Oh, I think 1 TB SSD will happen sooner than that. And reasonable-capacity SSDs - large enough for practical use, say 120/128GB - are plenty inexpensive enough. They boot tons faster, which is really all I use it for, along with app loading. I'm very happy with it.

On that MBP, I think the disk controller might even be older than SATA 2. Might be a slight compatibility issue.

 

[PCTC2]

My workstation (i7-920/X58/12GB DDR3) I don't even use anymore because I haven't upgraded it to an SSD yet (I would like a 480GB+ SSD) from the 1.5TB 7200.11 that is in it. I sit around waiting for it to boot, then sit around waiting for it to load my workspace.

I just built a new gaming machine (Core i5-2400/H77/8GB DDR3) and I put in a 120GB Corsair Force3 and it's like night and day. My old gaming machine (Core i7 860/P55/8GB DDR3) is now my workstation with a 160GB X25-M and, though not as fast, is now my primary workstation.

(You might ask why the 160GB X25-M is not in my workstation. It's because my workstation doesn't like the X25-M for some reason. It ran off a 60GB Agility3 fine, but that disk was too small and filled up quickly on just the OS and primary programs).

My other workstation (iMac 27" w/ 8GB DDR3) I don't use either because I don't have an SSD in their either. My MBP, MBA, and even my older Core2 machines scream on SSDs.

But then again I have a very I/O dependent work-load. Something on an SSD can take 5-10 minutes. Hard drives can take upwards of 40 minutes to an hour. Very small, random read and writes continuously.

 

[JohnnyChuttz]

Some of you guys are crazy. To me the difference was night and day going from an old Amd Athlon x2 5000+ with 3gb ram 7200 rpm platter OS drive, to the i5 rig I built with 8gb ram and a Crucial M4 128gb OS drive.

Everything is just rediculously fast.

Anyone that says that an SSD is snake oil needs to go use and old rig with a platter drive and then switch back to an ssd.

 

[bryanW1995]

I don't think that ssd pros/cons are an absolute in every single case, and there's no point insulting people who dont' agree with your opinion. I do agree with your statement about "ridiculously fast" as it applies to ssd's, however.

 

[npaladin-2000]

You know, you don't actually realize how fast an SSD truly is, until you try to go back to using a regular HDD.

 

[jhansman]

You know, you don't actually realize how fast an SSD truly is, until you try to go back to using a regular HDD.

Amen. I have to ship a new HP netbook back to them for replacement, and I put the original 5400 RPM spinner back in it shipped with. It was a joke how long Win7 took to boot. Uninstalled two apps, both took minutes (not seconds) to complete. Anyone who does not see how much quicker an SSD is than any rotational media is simply in denial. That said, I do now find myself occasionally wondering why apps don't load faster than they do, but that's just conditioning.

 

[bryanW1995]

Once your ssd starts to feel slow, then it's time to go RAID 0...

 

[BFG10K]

To me the difference was night and day going from an old Amd Athlon x2 5000+ with 3gb ram 7200 rpm platter OS drive, to the i5 rig I built with 8gb ram and a Crucial M4 128gb OS drive.

You’ve changed way too many variables to infer the SSD is the sole cause of the performance gain. I’m not saying the SSD isn’t making a difference, but your CPU and RAM are also playing a part.

Anyone that says that an SSD is snake oil needs to go use and old rig with a platter drive and then switch back to an ssd.

I use platter drives at work every day, and I’ll be reverting to a platter drive on my personal system shortly. My applications (Office 2010, Visual C++, IE) load maybe 1 second faster, and the OS reacts maybe half a second faster on the SSD compared to my Caviar Black.

My system boots 9 seconds faster, but I usually only boot 1-2 times a day. Shutting down is perhaps 1-2 seconds faster too, which again is typically done 1-2 times per day. The way some people talk about these benefits, you’d think they constantly reboot their system or something.

Actually one day I had to use a 1GB Windows 7 machine at work and that felt noticeably sluggish because it was obviously hitting the page file on regular basis. Ironically an SSD would’ve “helped” in that case by patching the symptom, not the cause.

I actually wonder how many Joe Averages get convinced to put SSDs into their old systems lacking RAM, and they mistakenly think it’s a marvel device.

But people in this forum routinely push 16GB-32GB+ which further takes the SSD out of the equation. A re-launched application loads fast because it’s cached in the RAM, not because your SSD is fast.

Unless you’re doing constant random I/O over very large random data sets and/or constantly copying files, I can’t how some people are reporting such massive differences.

 

[Eug]

This is 2.26 GHz Core2D 13" MacBook Pro (2009) with a slow older model 128 GB Kingston V100 SSD.

http://vimeo.com/27951421

I am totally overjoyed with the speed even from this slow SATA II SSD. Note though I was coming from the stock 5400 rpm laptop drive. If I had a Momentus XT, I wouldn't have bothered with the SSD upgrade. The Momentus XT is 7200 rpm, and already includes a mini SSD.

BTW, I didn't keep the V100, but not because of the speed. The reason I didn't keep it was because it used way more power than my previous platter drive. I replaced it with a V+100, which uses way, way less power, and also happens to use the same Toshiba controller Apple uses.

 

[sm625]

The problem with SSDs is that they are a coverup for bad programming on the part of microsoft. If your system is kept clean then you wont notice a difference. But there are some computers out there that are so bogged down by disk IO that the need for an SSD is obvious. They are what I consider to be completely unusable.... 30 seconds to open a word document... 20 seconds to open an explorer window. Try opening a browser and something else at the same time and it feels like it is going to lock up completely... those are the machines that need an SSD. Waht they really need of course is a wipe and reinstall, but sometimes that can only be a last last resort.

 

[Pneumothorax]

Does a 2009 MBP 13 even have SATA 3? I can't remember if it was that model or not but a few years ago there was some controversy over Apple restricting some MBP's to SATA 150 speeds.

I've been blown away by ever single one of my SSD purchases. With the recent price drops I'm actually toying with the idea of picking up a another 120gb SSD and pulling both mechanical drives from my desktop and relegating them to media and backup storage on my server.

This is one of the reasons I dumped my c2d mpb 13 and upgraded to a SB one last year. Mine was running my M4 256gb at only 1.5 Gbps speeds! Even an Intel 80gb G1 can saturate that.

 

[beginner99]

I use platter drives at work every day, and I’ll be reverting to a platter drive on my personal system shortly. My applications (Office 2010, Visual C++, IE) load maybe 1 second faster, and the OS reacts maybe half a second faster on the SSD compared to my Caviar Black.

Half a second times 100x a day is a lot and I'm more annoyed by the unpredictable stutters were the systems freezes for several seconds.

I believe it is similar to micro stuttering. Some people see and hate it others don't mind.

 

[Eug]

The problem with SSDs is that they are a coverup for bad programming on the part of microsoft. If your system is kept clean then you wont notice a difference. But there are some computers out there that are so bogged down by disk IO that the need for an SSD is obvious. They are what I consider to be completely unusable.... 30 seconds to open a word document... 20 seconds to open an explorer window. Try opening a browser and something else at the same time and it feels like it is going to lock up completely... those are the machines that need an SSD. Waht they really need of course is a wipe and reinstall, but sometimes that can only be a last last resort.

That argument doesn't make much sense. It's not as if SSDs only have significant benefit on Windows.

This is one of the reasons I dumped my c2d mpb 13 and upgraded to a SB one last year. Mine was running my M4 256gb at only 1.5 Gbps speeds! Even an Intel 80gb G1 can saturate that.

One of the reasons I kept my C2D MPB 13 was because the "slow" SSD sped up the machine so much. The benefit added by SATA III for general OS usage is marginal at best.

I personally won't buy a new MBP that doesn't have USB 3.