Choosing a SATA II 256GB ssd drive (or C300 vs samsung 470)

Read a lot of reviews and benchmarks, most of them have various performance charts, which is weird.
Still have to pick one of the drives 470 or c300 (256Gb one).

Basically I am planning to upgrade my laptop primary HDD, so it will be limited to SATA II interface. Simple everyday task usage, some audio/video recording software usage and a little gaming
What I have found out:
1. both drives looks good as far as SATA II performance goes, but from one side c300 is way better with 4K tests and has overall stable performance.
2. from the other side samsung has better energy efficiency and power consumption - which is better for a laptop. And better sequential read/write speeds, with very low 4K speeds.

Which one do you guys recommend? How important are the synthetic 4K test (does it affect the OS speed or general everyday usage)?
Whats your personal experience/opinion on those 2 drives?

What other SATA II performance drives can you recommend (except Intel's G2, not interest in that one for sure).

Thanks.

UPDATE: Ordered a new generation Crucial M4 256Gb drive. Will do post some of the benchmark test as soon as I will get it.

 

Battery life: If the question is meant for the laptop in your signature then the difference in battery life will be extremely small.

Performance: It will be impossible to notice a difference between Samsung 470 or Crucial C300.

Reliability: Samsung 470 and Crucial C300 both have superior reliability.

If they're the same price I might opt for C300 because you can take it with you to your next laptop, which will have SATA III.

If you want a no nonsense drive that just works the Samsung 470 is the best choice. C300 might require a LPM tweak.

Here's a review that compares these drives on SATA II:
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/storage/intel-ssd-320.aspx

 

Thanks for the info, found out a new candidate,
even better that 470 and c300 SATA II performance, judging by the review:
AnandTech - OCZ Agility 3 (240GB) Review

What do you think of OCZ vertex 3 drive? (more expensive though, but faster in sata2 and has native sata3 support).

 

Anandtech's Storage bench over emphasizes heavy (desktop like) multi tasking. During normal notebook usage you're not going to notice any difference with C300 or Samsung 470.

The amount of failures mentioned on Newegg.com for Sandforce drives is about 5 to 10 times higher than Crucial or Samsung 470.

Crucial M4 is a worth a look too. As fast as Agility 3 but better reliability.

 

So what about the 4K performance differences between c300 and 470?
How does that affect OS performance, desktop performance?

Thats weird but c300 somehow has overall better performance than new m4, maybe because the firmware upgrades made pushed the drive to its max..

So there is an issue with OCZ reliability?

 

did you read the Laptopmag review?

Real world performance M4 beats C300.
Crucial m4 256GB SSD (C400) Review - Install Times

20% failure rate on Newegg for Sandforce 1200:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...tomer-reviews-current-ssds-who-will-help.html

 

Thanks for the info, will look forward on m4 now

 

Actually did buy 256Gb crucial m4 already, need a new drive asap =)
Will post some more information and benchmark test when I will get it.
Phil, thanks again!

 

What exactly is meant by failure: bad sectors or crashed drive (unrecoverable)?
What can you say about the new crucial m4 using 25nm memory instead of 34nm on crucial c300?

 

According to the Micron blog, they have improved the algorithm in the M4 so that it has the same endurance as the C300 (for all models besides the 64GB one).

 

Look forward to your benchmark results GogolMogol! Many of us including myself are also limited to SATA II so should be interesting to see how a SATA III drive performs in a SATA II system!

 

King of Interns will do!
Another small question about the crystaldiskinfo status, for example it says 82% healthy at my work computer inferno patriot 64 gb ssd and has various error counts...