SSD - Crucial M4 or Vertex 2e Which?

Dear Folks,

Relying on your collective wisdom should I go for Crucial M4 or Vertex 2e SSD (120Gb)?

This is for my new L702x non 3D.

UK Prices are Vertex 2e £155 and Cricial M4 £170

ANDREW

 

Given OCZ's horrid track record, stick with the Crucial, or if you can afford, Intel SSDs.

 

When you consider performance, reliability, and price all together, the M4 is the best drive on the market IMO.

 

M4 definitely...

 

Yep, M4 > Vertex 2E.

 

Apparantely, M4 is the right option. Well, I am personally using Vertex 3 and it is doing just fine. can't complain

 

i'd soon go for m4 myself, when i get extra hdd bay and post some results! m4 - FTW)

 

The Crucial M4 and Intel 510 series are based on the same (reliable) Marvel controller: Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2.
At first sight there doesn't seem much differences between both ssd's except the Intel 510 is much more expensive than the Crucial M4. When using the Anandtech storage Bench ( comparing Intel 510 250GB vs Crucial M4 256GB, both on sata3 - 6Gbps), I concluded the following:

• Power consumption is a bit higher on the Intel
• Intel tends to be slightly faster on sequential read/write for large files, but when it comes to small files (especially writing) the Crucial is much faster.
• Crucial has much better random read than the Intel (+/- 200MBps vs 50 MBps)

Don't know if those differences will be noticed in real-time daily use, but seeing the price difference, the Crucial M4 definitely seems the best choice.
Besides, there's a great community support at Crucial if you happen to have an issue.

Crucial M4 vs OCZ Vertex 2E
The Vertex 2E doesn't support sata3 - 6Gbps, which your xps17 L702x does. It would be a shame not using the whole potential of your sata controller.

 

Dear Guys

Great help 120Gb SSD M4 ordered!

Now can anyone point me to the best guide for installation...if this were a "normal" hard disk I would "True Image" over...but I understand this is not the best way on a SSD?

Regards

ANDREW

 

M4 is SATA 3 Vertex 2 is only SATA2 - quite a visible difference in performance.

To install, replace the boot HD (HD1 the one closer to memory slots) with M4. Before starting, make a backup of your Drivers folder, should contain all drivers installed. You should have them on a DVD you receive also, but just in case...Nothing special, just have the correct screwdriver, and don't lose the screws inside, they are small.The disk is inside a frame, remove the 4 screws, remove the frame with the disk and after remove the disk from from frame.There is a manual on Dell, download it. Your BIOS should be st in AHCI mode (it should already be set like this, just double check). Do a clean install of Windows, during install it detects that you have an SSD and will do the optimizations automatically.There are a few others which you may or may not want to do after, like disable indexing, but you can leave it as is.For the clean install you either have your own copy of Windows, or request from Dell the OEM disk.I sugest to install W7x64SP1 (integrated SP1) than install RTM and SP1 after but if you use Dell's disk you may not have a choice (the laptop comes with RTM only installed not SP1).ISOs are widely available on the net (be sure is an original untouched one with correct MD5 code) but you will still need to know how to activate it.Do your home work, and remember it's a "Dell" (OEM system)...

After install, you will have Microsoft AHCI driver for SSD and HD.You can keep this is quite stable, I did not have the slightest problem since installing the SSD.If you want to get the maximum out of SSD you can install Intel's storage driver, but from what I read you will need to do some registry editing to disable one feature (PLM) which it looks like none of available SSDs on market (except maybe Intel's ?) do not work well with.

If you do a disk image of the HD and copy it to the SSD I'm afraid you will need to manually change a few settings, check other forums, as I don't think Windows is going to do it for you (like disable defrag for SSD...) if you did not do an install.

After installing Windows you will not have all your drivers installed yet so start installing. I would go first and download from Dell the newest versions available, but you can install the ones on DVD and go after that and update the ones which have a newer version. If you use WiDi I would go directly to Intel and download the newest versions, I think Dell is a little bit behind as Intel changes quite often WiDi drivers.

For additional software provided with your laptop (like DVD software) you should search for "My dell downloads" and register (you will need your tag code). Office starter is not there but I think you can download it from MS...

Good luck.

 

You can download the Office 2010 OEM Preinstallation Kit. It contains Office 2010 Starter (and MS Essentials, Bing Bar,...). I don't know if you can customize install and only select the Office Starter installation.

I haven't tried it out yet.
I bought myself the full Office 2010 suite through college, because the Starter Suite was too limited for me.