Intel 510 vs. Crucial M4 (both 128gb)

Hi all, I'm pretty new to the world of SSDs and I'm sure these questions have been asked a million times before, so please excuse my ignorance

I'm planning to order a Clevo/Sager P150HM pretty soon. I wanted to get a 128gb SSD and a ~750gb HDD with it. Here are my two options:

1. Configure my system directly from the reseller with an Intel 510 120gb SSD (+$260 upgrade) and a 750gb HDD (+$115 upgrade).
Total cost: $375.

2. Configure my system with just the 750gb HDD (+$45 upgrade) and a HD caddy in the optical bay (+$15 upgrade). Order the Crucial M4 128gb SSD from newegg (on sale for $170 right now, not sure how much longer this deal will last.) I will have to install the SSD, windows and all the drivers from scratch (and of course, configure them correctly). I'm fairly tech savvy, but I don't have any experience in this area. It will be a learning experience. I would prefer to install from the discs rather than cloning from the HDD.
Total cost: $230 (+ my time)

So basically I'm wondering... Is the crucial an excellent drive, both in terms of speed and failure rate? Is option 2 the best choice, even though I'll have to learn how to install/configure it from scratch (and might screw up somewhere along the line)? How much do Crucial M4s usually cost? Am I stupid for even asking these question? Keep in mind that the Intel 510 would be covered under my laptop's 2 year parts warranty (I assume).

TL;DR: Install/configure Crucial M4 from scratch and save ~$145 or stick with a pre-configured Intel 510?

Hopefully everything I wrote makes sense.

 

You're much better off getting the seemingly more expensive option and then doing a clean install (if ANY garbage S/W is installed at all) yourself.

You are getting better value, better warranty (whole system) and more options especially if the 750GB HDD is a WD or Hitachi 7200 RPM version and the optical drive is also installed/available with the pre-configured version.

To get the optimum experience, I would recommend to do a clean install and use the following link to move the Users folder to the 750GB HDD.

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...gramdata-folder-separate-drive-partition.html


With the above 'optimum' setup, you will be spoiled for a good long while - not to mention the knowledge you will have gained from learning how to do a proper clean, two drive (SSD/HDD) install.

Good luck.

 

Thank you very much for the reply. As I expected, I wasn't very clear on a few issues:

I'm buying from a reseller with a great reputation. From what I understand, their windows installations are very lean - not much garbage to get rid of.

The 750GB hard drive will be the same make/model in both options. Not sure exactly which company makes it, but I'm fairly confident that it will be a good drive (and it is 7200rpm).

There won't be an internal optical drive in either option (replaced with an HD caddy). I was planning to buy an external DVD drive (that's also how I was hoping to install windows - not sure if that's possible).

Hmm, I was planning to manually move the folders inside the User folder (Documents, Pictures, ProgramData etc) to the secondary hard drive. Although it is less elegant, wouldn't it accomplish the same thing? Are there any major benefits to doing it the other way?

Doing a clean install just for the sake of learning actually sounds somewhat tempting, but I'll probably be much more motivated to play games and stuff. So unless there's a huge benefit, I probably won't do a clean install right away.

 

go with the M4, it's much cheaper, has more GB, and takes only minutes to install.

 

Although you can move some of the folders inside the Users folder, you can't move all/most of them.

Highly recommended (that link I provided) - especially when using a dual SSD/HDD system.

 

+1 to M4. HIGHLY recommended drive. The Intel 510 is good too though, if you want to avoid having to do a reinstall yourself. Clean installs on a fresh system are pretty easy since you don't have to do much backing up. But yea, I don't think the reseller Sagers have much in the way of crapware installed. Heck, some places like Xotic PC offer you the option of not even getting an OS with it (but Sager's charges for the OS are very reasonable, barely more than OEM off Newegg).

The $170 on the 128GB M4 was a Shell Shocker yesterday, so that price is gone. But, that drive often goes on sale, the same drive with the transfer kit was a Shell Shocker only like 2 weeks ago (for $200, yesterday's deal was a steal).

Yes, you can move just some of the users stuff. I haven't bothered to move the whole thing myself, I just remap the Documents/Pictures/Videos/Music to my spinner Hard Drive. When space is a premium, move the whole thing per Tiller's link, it's amazing how much can get stuffed into the App Data folders.

 

Will I have to mess around with drivers/settings very much to get the Crucial M4 working well? How about flashing the firmware?

I'm afraid I'm going to miss a detail and screw everything up. Any good tutorials online?

 

Might as well flash to the latest firmware. It's easy, just burn the appropriate ISO image to a disc, install the SSD, boot from CD, and let it update. Takes about 1 minute once you boot from the disc.

And all you need to get it running right is to set the SATA controller to AHCI in the bios. Then install Windows. Run the Windows Experience test once you've done your drivers installations. Then double-check that defragging is disabled on the SSD. That's all you have to do. Any other tweaks are optional and don't provide much noticeable benefit in most cases.

 

I have the Intel 510 and it isn't all that impressive as it seems to be for a SATA III drive, the Random 4k's is pretty low even when compared to my Intel X25-M...



Crucial SSD's have been pretty impressive in their speeds lately so I would give a nod to them too.

 

since both have the same controllers, they are pretty equal, however crucial launched a new firmware that brought a good performance boost to the m4, I would go with the cheaper option

 

yeah the 0009 firmware update boosted the M4's speeds by ~20%.

 

On the read side yes indeed. No real changes on the write side, but reads are more critical anyway. My drive boosted nicely right up to the 500MB/s sequential mark, good jumps in 512k and 4kQD32 as well. My 4k randoms still are off...someday maybe I'll try to fix that, but the thing is nice and fast, so whatever.

Crucial is looking really good of late, and of course they were the king last year with the C300 too.