Crucial C300 128GB $200 Good Deal?

I have not been in the SSD loop for a while, newegg has a sale today though for this one for $200 shipped. Seems one of the better rated & tested SSD's and sounds like a good deal.

Get it or hold out for a good Intel 160GB sale?

 

I think it's an excellent deal, myself. If I was in the market, I'd likely jump on it.

 

Vicious I was also looking at that.

It's either that or the new Intel 320. Intel b/c its rated as the most reliable drive and the increased read speed of the Crucial isn't that big of a deal. It's "slower" but according to this review doesn't seem to be that big of a deal.

http://www.laptopmag.com/review/storage/intel-ssd-320.aspx

But I do need to buy 2 (laptop and desktop), and the savings would be pretty significant for me to get the Crucial. Ahhh!!!

 

Crucial seems like a good drive, speeds on the C400 are only a little higher seq reads, but loses in other aspecsts, so imo it remaims a really good drive, and the user reviews for the 128GB on amazon/newegg seems very favorable. I decided more toward intel mostly as having such a good experience with x25m, but that was my second choice out of price.

 

Man, I know compared to everything else right now it's a good price. But doesn't it bug you that it's the same price as December? Maybe a tad more even?

 

Sold Out...

 

I debated

But I just bought a Momentus XT & a new keyboard the other day so I already did my spending.

Also I plan a new mobo & cpu so may as well get the SSD at the same time. I think part of my computer slowness is perhaps the chipset itself on my computer, things slow to a crawl when the HDD is busy for some reason even if its reading a file on a totally seperate hdd.

When I saw this for $230 at amazon suddenly $200 didnt seem like the biggest sale in the world, was going to get the newegg prefered and chop $15 more off though to make it $185 shipped.

 

For that drive, it is an incredibly good deal. I bought 2x of them for myself earlier this morning.

$200 for 120GB is about the going rate for a good deal on a SATA2 SandForce SF-1200 or Intel X25-M drive (give or take +/- $20). $200 for a SATA3 Corsair C300 is phenomenal. It is one of the best performing drives out, especially for people like me on SATA2 interfaces.

 

Yeah, I saw Amazon's price also and decided to just wait it out. I wasn't planning to buy one till next month anyway. Right now it's definitely more of a want than a need. Really upgrading my computer for Battlefield 2 when it comes out

 

Well I gave in, but got a 160GB G2 Intel on Ebay for $208 shipped.

I got the capacity I wanted and a tried & true drive. I feel a bit guilty with the purchase since all day I have been looking at benchmarks showing the C300 is better than the X25-M but the extra 40GB should come in handy. There is of course the G3 intel out now also, but I think I like the G2 more for some reason and for the price it was a good deal.

It was a bit of a gamble since it was on ebay and an OEM pull from a HP machine so I'll have to get it setup and tested right away.

What are the best things to do soon as I get it to make sure its all working A'OK? probably going to go ahead and do a clean install. I have over 400GB of stuff on my C: so I cant clone it over anyways.

 

Check total writes to the drive and powered on hours, mostly. Maybe check firmware too. Not entirely sure what else might be needed to be checked on Intels.

 

I guess there is an intel software I can check that with?

 

intel toolbox, download from intel. not much to check though. I used it only to see my monthly write to get a sense of my work pattern.

 

Intel Toolbox for my G2

E1 Host writes: 1.87 TB. Not much is it?
C0 Unsafe shutdown count: 20. What does this mean?

 

wow. that is quite a number. My gauge is about 100G/month and I have it for 6 months. The only number that is interesting is the host write. The other is the bad block which usually is 0. All the rest I simply ignore.

I believe it used up about 15-20% of Intel's measured life(public figure, internally they may have a higher number).

 

Ok thanks. 20% with my figure or with your drive?
I have had the G2 for 14 months now. So 134 Gigs/Month.

I have heard that HDD is the first component of the computer to go. Estimated life time around 3 years or so. So with my use i can have my SSD for 5 years? Isn`t that good?

 

140G/month is not a figure that I would concern at all. Mine is rated 7TB so I can have at least 5 years out of it and by then the laptop is 10 years old.

you can find the actual rated/tested number on Intel web site.

 

Cloudfire, yeah - that's good. You should even have it last even more than 5 yrs with your usage.

(Lol @ 134GB/month - that can be a single download 'session' for me - and sometimes I need to do that 2 or 3 times a day - depending on what, which and how many bodies I'm shooting with. That's still only ~4, 32GB CF cards full of images - to put things in perspective).

 

Poor SSDs. You shouldn`t be allowed to own one lol.
If i remember correctly you do a lot of testing as well, so that will probably do a lot of writes to the drive i reckon. I do occasionally gaming, watching movies and music. Thats it. No heavy programming or something like that.
This whole discussion just show how reliable and good option the SSDs are to HDD. People tend to use the "Well SSDs won`t last so long" when arguing against SSDs. For normal users they are just as good, maybe even better.

 

No, no testing. And, if it makes you feel better, I don't actually own an SSD that is put into such use (none have qualified so far...).

Your conclusion 'that for normal users they may be even better' is simply circular reasoning from my perspective.

SSD's are not marketed (solely) on their reliability - they're being marketed for their superiority - over HDD's. In that respect, they fail to deliver (when all aspects of a storage subsystem are taken into consideration).

Sure, most people will see SSD's as a step up (even a 'big' step up) in storage performance. But the people who need real improvements in storage performance are still waiting...

At least on the mobile front. (Where the choices are most limited).

 

Out of curiosity, in what areas do they fail to deliever?
Speed - Check
Reliability - Check (For intel atleast)
Life expectacy - Check
Price - ?
?

 

1) Price (vs. performance increase).

2) Capacity (this seems to be changing with the Intel 320 series).

3) Speed - not peak, up to, or any other useless benchmarks - but in consistent, sustained and indisputably faster (from my 'baseline' partitioned HDD's) speed.


While everything is inter-related - (how fast it is can certainly offset how expensive it is, for eg.) capacity is what is holding them back right now for an actual productivity increase over (comparatively 'massive') HDD's).

When I factor in the time it takes to copy/move/manage partially completed projects to deal with the capacity limitations - a HDD is still worlds ahead of even the fastest SSD set up I've tried (a 2x 120GB SSD configuration) because even though it just plods along - even plodding, it finishes the work faster than having to baby a puny SSD and keep feeding it more new data to work on (and of course take off all the new data it created) a few times a session.

So, for my usage pattern - out of your list:

Speed - not enough (take off that check mark!)

Reliability - good enough for the limited testing I've done with them.

Life expectancy - not good enough for my workflow (but I wouldn't care replacing drives every year or so if the other parameters were reason enough too.

Price - ha. I mean HA! Especially as capacity goes up.

I know, I'm near a worst case usage scenario (not quite though: database/server usage scenario's can eat an (MLC) SSD for lunch in ~2 weeks - yeah - dead), but right now 'high performance' and SSD's is an oxymoron from my viewpoint.

They help in all situations when the goal is more 'snap' - but 'snap' is not, nor ever has been equal to 'performance' - in the storage subsystem.

You may want to read this if you haven't already:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/7308779-post14.html

 

Thank you for finally posting a clear concise reason why SSD's dont work well FOR YOU! It makes me very happy to read this instead of your other "SSDs are bad" posts.

 

ZRock,

I'm just as glad to be able to write it. This has been a long 20 month journey for me.

 

tiller,

I don't think the technology is advancing as the consumer (MLC) drives, but do you even wonder if an SLC based solution would work in your use case?

There are other limiting factors for SLC (such as $$ and size), but I wonder with better write speeds if an SLC based drive would better handle your situation? If manufacturers could somehow make improvements to their process getting the $$/size to around $3/GB and 128GB.

Just a thought.

 

For really heavy write like his, SLC is actually cheaper(if you look at $/write). However, SLC doesn't automatically mean faster. Intel's x25e is not to be shown faster than x25m. And there aren't many other 'consumer' brand SLC SSD anyway. SLC is mainly targetting corporation with heavy write pattern(like database).

If he works mainly on desktop, a SF based setup with periodic SE should work quite alright.

 

Unless I read his posts incorrectly, he does have heavy, heavy write patterns. And I believe the info going on his drives is already in a compressed file format, which perform poorly as you fill up a SF 1xxx based SSD. I believe this is true on SF 2xxx based drives, but the problem is not as bad.

Not sure I blieve SLC doesn't mean faster... Quoting from a Super Talent white paper, "SLC Flash devices provide faster write performance and greater reliability." These seems to be some of tiller's hang-ups. Not having worked with an SLC based drive, I only can go the info the ( :gasp: ) vendors supply.

In any case, the question was not to distract from the "C300 a good deal" topic, but rather something that crossed my mind for tiller to consider.

 

More are in. I ordered yesterday. Even with a SATA III bus (new W520), I don't see anything better at even remotely near this price.

Perry

 

i'm getting mine in today, in about an hour.

can't wait to install it when i get home tonight. hopefully i don't run into any problems.

 

Mine is due in, in a few days.

Think I will have an alignment problem if I just clone my disk onto the SSD with Acronis? Its a fairly new install and I hate to install all my programs/games and other stuff like fonts and photoshop brushes from scratch if its not needed.

 

lovin my C300, my first SSD.

everything is faster except for Firefox 4 for some reason; what a POS program.

 

That doesn't sound right at all. Are you aligned properly? Or at least did you do a clean install? If you did, that gives me reservations about c300.

 

i don't know what you mean by alignment.

yes, its a clean install and i'm only referring to firefox startup.

chrome for example boots the same as on my platter, instantaneously; that's how good a program it is.
firefox still isnt as instant as chrome which is sorta what i expected from the ssd, but dont really care all that much since it's fast none the less.

 

Acronis is how I upgraded my 80 GB HDD in the T61 to a WD Scorpio 320GB.

However I have read you need to put the target drive inside the machine for some reason. Use the source drive external or in the Ultrabay Caddy. Edit: I apologize: that is true for Lenovo machines only.....got something to do with the system partition.

I will try that this weekend and let you know. If you get to it first please post here.

Perry

 

man, i think i may have that stuttering issue.
will have to read into it tomorrow to understand more about it.

if anyone has a good list of users discussing the problem please link me to the page.

thanks

 

If try Windows defualt instead of Intel RST.

If that doesnt work check Solution: C300 Disk Freeze-ups in Windows 7 solved for me

 

I think the newest Acronis edition is alignment aware, supposedly. Not sure which version you're using, obviously.

 

how do i check what version of RST I have?

i cant find my drive under device manager.

 

He said he did a clean install. So, he shouldn't have alignment issues. Unless, of course, he doesn't know what clean install means.

 

Help a dummy out a bit. What are the alignment issues you describe?

Perry

 

FF 4 does apparently has some issues. I've noticed the same thing in FF4, but no other app (compilers, IDEs, graphics programs, email, benches, xterms, etc.) has that problem.

In regards to "alignment", they mean partition alignment problems caused by a restoration of an older version of a tool like Acronis.

 

Clone is done, seems to be fine, i checked with diskpar and its aligned. However it cloned the hidden recovery partition and so I need to find a way to take care of that.

Now my scores seem low though.

CrystalDiskMark 3

253.1 135.7
223.9 136.7
12.52 15.54
188.7 128.7

I have seen scores posted nearly 2x higher I think but they were on SATA3 but that is only a small bost...

 

4k's seem very low. Have you tried the intelppm tweak?

 

i got almost the exact same scores yesterday.

 

You mean 12.52 4K read 15.54 4K write?

If I'm not mistaking this is what I got with a C300 64GB

 

Yes, those are my scores in the 4k listed out as they appear in the bench window.

I think it may be a issue with the chipset used in the G73, there are a few threads about how SSD do not perform up to par in the G73 and my numbers seem to co-incide with that.

Think even though the clone worked I am going to do a clean install anyways, simply becaue I have not been able to update to SP1 so may as well go ahead and do a clean install and get every windows update and get SP1 and make a new image for the future. It may be important down the road to have the SP1 update so may as well jump a smaller hurdle now rather than a larger one later.

 

If it's the chipset I would try the intelppm tweak. Disable it (from 3 to 4) in your registry and run the benchmark again.

 

what do you think about the cstate halt tweak also? I never use the laptop on battery really and I saw huge gains on some peoples benches when they turned those off.

 

Intelppm was all I needed to get those good results. I never tried cstate halt tweak. After running the benchmarks I enabled intelppm again, for lower heat.

In real life only install times benefit from the tweak. Load performance doesn't really.

 

For the C300, that does seem low. Is there a large discrepancy on drives of different sizes w/ the C300?

FWIW, I'm on C300 256GB [FW] 0006, on a SATA2 controller.