Intel 320/510 or Crucial M4?

Hey

I'm looking at getting a SSD, and decided on either the Intel 320/510 120 GB or Crucial M4 128GB. (I know the Intel 320 120GB is slower than both the 510 and M4 but it's on sale for 120 right now.)

Which would give the best price/speed ratio? and what's a good price to buy them at?

What I've been seeing in price is around 300 for the intel 510, and 210 for the Crucial. Of course cheaper would be better but if it's not reliable then don't want to get it.

Thanks

 

The Intel 510 series and the Crucial M4 both use the Marvel controller...go for the M4...less money and reliability is the same...

 

Thanks Bobmitch!

Just a couple questions... What's a good price to get the M4? 210 seems to be pretty much retail, does it go down to like 150? or 170 sometimes?

Also it's better to get M4 over the 320 @ $120?

 

If I were you, I'd get the 320 at $120. The deal is quite amazing.

 

This thread may be (very) intresting for you:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...ash-storage/626155-any-using-corsair-ssd.html

Benchmarks and some first impressions is posted on second page.

 

I have the 320...it is SATAII. Nice drive but not in the M4's league, speedwise. Crucial is a very good company that backs up their products. At some point, I am looking into to the M4 256GB to replace the 320 as the OS drive. Then I will switch the 320 to D for programs and data.

Cheapest I have found the Crucial 128 is at Tiger Direct for $204.

 

Would I notice the speed difference between a 320 and m4? I do have a SataIII port.

So torn between these SSD ... Wish I had a crystal ball to know when the Crucial will go on discount ... if it dropped to like 170/180 I'd jump on it! But if I get a 320 for 120$ I don't want to spend more to get another ... unless i use 2 SSD ... sigh ...

 

I am a normal user and I don't even notice the difference between SATA 2 vs 3 with my M4.

 

Normal usage? no

Copying files and/or heavier multi tasking? yes.

Samsung 830 is worth a look too. Comes with a free game now.

Samsung 830 > Crucial M4 > Intel 510 > Intel 320.

 

Oh Samsung, I swear they're going to grow like crazy and get into every sector, if not already.

I'll take a look at the 830, what's a good price range for that? in the 120GB area? and what controller is in it?

Thanks

 

Seriously? Don't you think his CPU or RAM will be a bottleneck rather then the SSD?

 

What's his notebook?

All I know is he has a notebook with SATA III port.

 

I don't know either. But just think that the CPU and RAM have more to do with multitasking rather then the SSD. For sure it matters, but I would say that the CPU and RAM comes first.

 

Also on a lighter SATA III notebook you'll see significant differences between M4 and 320 while copying files and multi tasking.

It depends on the kind of multi tasking whether it's primarily bottlenecked by storage, CPU or memory.

Anandtech has examples of light multi tasking bottlenecked by SSD:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4712/the-crucial-m4-ssd-update-faster-with-fw0009/5

 

I really love my M4 , have nothing but great things to say about it. I would say it has some of reliability/price/performance on the market today. No matter what an SSD will me many times faster than a 7200RPM HDD.

I'd say its the best investment I've ever made in a single compotent, paired with an i7, you'll have a very fast and responsive system.

 

That's intresting really! However, I know the drive is fast, but my point was, if he have a laptop with i3 and 4GB RAM, I would say the i3 or even maybe i5 became a problem before the SSD drive.. Or, what you think?

I think this way, but have been watching my own CPU ussage, my T9900 is never spiked up to 100%....

 

It really depends on what multi tasking were talking about. The example I gave will be bottlenecked by the storage even on a low Core i3.

Here are three more multi tasking examples on a Core i5 2410m:

Kingston V+ 100 96GB SSD Review

In the first scenario the SSD isn't the bottle neck, in the second more and in the third even more.

 

Worth to add:
Next, we ran three different tests to measure the multi-tasking performance of the SSD. The first was opening a larger JPEG image with Photoshop while a virus scan was running in the background. The displayed time is the time it took to open the jpg image and Photoshop. The second multitask test involved decompressing a large RAR file with a virus scan simultaneously. The time displayed is the time it took to complete both jobs. The last multi-tasking test consisted of three tasks ran simultaneously: a folder was copied, a RAR file extracted and a folder was scanned. The time displayed in the graph is the time it took to complete all three jobs.

I really don't know what to say, from my own experience, my SSD is not overloaded at any time, either is my CPU, but when I'm still waiting for something, it must be the Windows 7 or the RAM then I have plenty of RAM which gets good score too. Stumped.

 

I have a Intel 320 80gb in a dell studio and a M4 128 gb in a m18 and they are both very fast.
If your laptop has SATA III then I would get the m4 as its cheaper per gig and should be faster for big file transfers.

Here are my scores:

m4:



Intel 320

 

How does the M4 compare with the 320 when both are running at SATA II mode?

 

Perhaps you have a different definition of what it means when a component is a bottle neck.

Something as simple as booting your computer is bottle necked by the SSD. It's simple to prove, as exchanging the SSD for a different one changes the boot time.

When Windows is installing updates and you want to continue using your computer, for example by launching programs, the SSD will be a bigger bottle neck. Not all the time but for moments, and this will negatively affect performance.

Crucial will still be faster partly because of the better 4K performance.

Anandtech probably has benchmarks in older reviews that show the performance on sata II. However, M4 performance has gone up a lot with the new 009 firmware.

 

From all the reviews I've seen its still significantly faster. Both Anandtech and toms have done reviews.

 

I have also done some simply benchmark, you can find it on 5739G owners thread in ACER section.

 

@ tuηay, that's a 50 page owner thread. Can you please point us to the exact location or copy the info here?

 

Performance pictures by TunayK - Photobucket

Anything for you Phil

My Acer is running Sata II.

Side note: No nasty SSD tweak gudie is used, stock, out of the box with clean installation of Windows