Crucial vs Kingston SSD

Hi guys

sorry about this thread...but seeing most of you head towards the SSD route....i thought i'd give it a shot too......i have read as much as i can and have come to the conclusion

that (unfortunately of being in AU and the prices) i could procure

a Crucial M4 128GB for 239 AU$ or
a Kingston HyperX 120GB for 259 AU$

question is which......this would be my first SSD and i wouldnt mind an extra bit of boost....thanks

PS if any of u have or know of vendors that could sell this hardware (and ship to Aus) a lot cheaper do not hesitate to give out the links

 

If it is your first SSD, then you should got for the Crucial. It will give you an amazing and noticeable boost in speed, better load times, decreased chance of failure than the Kingston (because the hyperx is SandForce) and you save $20

 

mmm, no idea for cheaper places, but word of advice, a 128gb fills up quick. i have a kingston 128 gb (cost 350 usd easy), and with win7 64 pro on, norton, flight sim X and sc ii installed it is half full already. So i hope you dont have too many games installed at once on your machine. Other than that its great

 

I got the HyperX SSD but was well aware of the potential issues that may happend due to Sandforce controllers. Plus I am willing to change settings and such to make things work.

The Crucial seems to be the obvious choice if you want a fast reliable SSD. That being said I haven't had a issue with my drive for almost a month of usage.

Good Luck

 

I went with the Crucial M4. I have had no issues, now in week two. The only thing that caused any problems was Macafee. Other than that no issues at all!! Go with the M4 save some dollars and possible head aches.

 

Crucial M4 and Intel 510 both seem to be good choices right now. Highly recommended by many.

 

thank you all......

i don't intend to use the SSD for anything else but for Windows boot up and or for OS stuff..... games will work off the HDD

Crucial M4 it is...although i really think the HyperX has the cool factor and not to mention it's way faster......

last few qs. does the M4 have the same issue of yore where it wont achieve 6Gbps on either of the 2 HDD ports of the M17Xr3, and does one have to apply some LPM fixes ??

 

through much trial and error, if you want to achieve SATA3 speeds, install the SSD in port1...leave the HDD where it is. port 1 is in the center of the laptop.

 

The M4 has no trouble maintaining 6GB speeds on Port 1; the erratic speed with Port 0 is not M4 specific; it applies to all SSD's. Following the application of Firmware 0009, speed differentials are reduced and require benchmarking to identify. They are undetectable in normal desktop use.

 

oh damn. This comment just reminded me that I didn't check my FM rev. on my M4 before doing all that installing yesterday. Ah well, it's supposed to be non-destructive to update the FW just makes me nervous.

Edit: FW update proceeded just fine. Whew.

 

ok....this all sounds great, now to decide whether its worth it to get the 120 or the 256......which (un) fortunately brings me to another qs. is there any trouble if one partitions the SSD..i have most of the tutorials from NBR regarding clean installs and stuff....but not much on partitioning...

i'd like to have a partition for win7 and another for win8

 

Ideally your entire SSD should be a single partition. If you let windows 7 install itself onto the SSD, it will handle it all for you, so nothing to worry about. Windows will make 1 partition by default (not including the 100mb system partition but isn't visible anyway and you have to have it).

The reason an SSD should be a single partition is so that it can wear evenly across the whole SSD. If you have two partitions, and one gets more use than the other, hypothetically you could wear out half of your SSD while the other half would still work (which would basically make the whole thing messed up). This would take a long time to occur, but it is best to avoid it altogether by making a single partition.

If you want to run a 2nd OS on the SSD also, I cannot help you because I have never done it. I will say this though, I beta tested Windows 7, and it was a huge waste of my time. Driver support was sketchy, and I spent hours trying to get things to work. My advice, let the pros do the testing, I am going to enjoy my M17 and Windows 7 while other people do the hard work of testing windows 8.

 

Ya go for the crucial as well, apparently with the 009 firmware the reads speeds have gone up quite a bit to like 490 I believe

 

I have a 128GB crucial with 0009 FW adn I get the following crystaldiskmark results:

Seq 479.6 196.9
512k 362.7 179.3
4k 23.33 44.68
QD32 312.3 179.2

 

I was about to order Kingston, but you guys are the pro's so 250 GB M4 it is. Thanks....

 

You won't be disappointed with an M4.

​

 

I would go with M4 just because of Sandforce in Kingston. That means potentional issues and a lot of wasted time solving them ...

 

i went with the M4 because it has the reputation of reliability...and price...its also one of the more reasonably priced SSDs (last week on sale for 169.99 at ncix.com)

 

those numbers look familiar

 

But somehow we're a good bit slower than Revelator... Not sure why that might be.

 

are you AHCI or raid in your bios?. I believe Revelator is AHCI and he did some tweaks to his system.

I'm on RAID and have done very few tweaks

 

I'm raid.. though I thought that it should be roughly equal given that raid incorporates all the ahci protocols. hmm...

 

personally i don't think it makes a difference RAID or AHCI because they are similar. I left it raid because it was easy for me to boot from my HDD in the event that my SSD install wasn't going well.

Rev did do a bunch of tweaks though

 

The speed differences are not controller dependent or caused by tweaks, they are the result of design/firmware differences that reduce the 128GB speeds to further differentiate the 256GB models for marketing purposes. Apparently this is an industry strategy.

 

Ahh, didn't know you had a 256. Now it makes sense.

By the way, it's not just for marketing reasons, it's partially due to the fact that you have twice the number of die across which to interleave the read/write accesses. Effectively ssds work as a massive raid-0 array across each die.

For example, the difference between a vertex3 and a vertex maxIOPs is that they went with more nand dies (16 vs 32 in 120GB drives)each holding half as much data to make a wider array. A maxIOPs at 120 performs almost identically to a 240 Vertex.

 

i didn't realize you had the 256gig version either! Darth, In everyday usage, you won't notice an difference between the 256 vs 128 version.

 

Oh, I know... I'm not worried about it. I was just trying to figure out how his could bench so differently...

 

well...finally bit the bullet and bought the Crucial M4 128

and its good...i now know what i've been missing, only thing is wish (or perhaps) might have held out a bit longer for the offical launch of the samsung 830..the reviews are pretty good.....not to mention AW trusts samsung...so there must be some good to it........ anywhoo..still quite ecstatic with the purchase

yes i did bench..however i had no idea that one had to have the drive as clean as humanly possible.....so i present to you the benchmark of the 2 popular H/SSD programs with the M4 filled with 28% of data


ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting

 

Excellent numbers. Enjoy your new M4.

 

your numbers look right inline with mine. Congratz on the SSD!

 

Heh thanks ..... one thing however for the uninitiated (AKA me) I ran into this issue on late Saturday/Sunday night that the 2 Seagates on my m17 would not drop the RAID0 they were accustomed to,tried dban and gparted still no dice, I finally had to pull apart the cover and put both of em in, wipe the RAId then continue with my installation

@ revelator ,mate don't you think the nos.seem a bit off,all those 500+reads on m4's and SSF is makin me jealous...not to mention I can't read temps on via smart on aida64..any more apps for one stop co figs to help make the speeds a bit better? I've been thru NBR's,thessdreview sites for bettering my SSD use


P.S...and would u reckon a SAMSUNG 830 would be better of than the SSF 22xx series(for a 256gb)

 

Those 500+ reads on M4's and SandForce drives are for 256GB/512GB drives on test beds with little or no data written to the disks prior to testing. Also remember that most M4 tests were conducted prior to the release of Firmware 0009. The Samsung 830 looks promising, but it hasn't even been released for sale yet. We'll see. You can't chase these SSD numbers; everyone is jumping into the market and pushing the performance limits to distinguish themselves. Moreover, even 100 point differences in the sequential tests are meaningless for most people. I have an old Intel X25-M 160GB SSD in my M15x. The 256GB M4 in my R3 is at least twice as fast on benchmarks, but the difference is nearly undetectable in everyday use. They're both fast as hell.

 

I'll definitely be looking for a new SSD sometime soon. Those numbers are just disgusting.

The 256 drives are definitely worth the price. You won't go insane trying to figure out what you can fit on a 120ish drive.

My numbers are much lower, I am curious if I'd notice any difference with these newer SSD's.

Patriot Torqx 128
206.66 98.84
14.81 9.23
54.79 7.41
0.259 0.519

 

on a side note....noticed something along the lines of not having access to the NCQ box in the device manager ....me just wondering if that's to do with some special drivers or something you guys use.....and is their a way to use existing programs for SSD from Samsung/intel to work on Crucial's SSD

@ bloodroses...chief.... i know what you are saying but believe me.... the 128 is quite a lot...sure you wont have any games on it....but that's ok....my total installation and programs list ....(minus PS 3.0) comes in at 32.1 GB

 

M4 to go, and on the irratic port behavior, i have an intel 510 on port 0 and works fine on 6gbs. no issues at all.