Upgrade from Crucial C300 to Crucial M4?

Curious if it is worth the upgrade from a 256GB C300 to a 256GB M4 drive. Money is not really an issue....but reliability is.

I don't expect to be blown away....but squeezing more more performance out of my laptop would be nice.

Thanks!

 

I think I have read a few posts with C300 owners that claim M4's are slower than their C300's.

As long as your C300 is working reliably for you right now, I don't think you need to 'up/down/side - grade' your SSD.

On the other hand, with money not being an issue - why don't you just find out for yourself?

 

Thanks...it was a bit of a passing thought.

I'll wait until the SSDs are hitting 700mb/sec

 

Not on SATA3 they won't.

 

Yeah you do. Even above 1000MB/s... RAID0

 

Cloudfire, good point!

But not many notebooks support dual drive bays, let alone proper RAID setups.

 

Which is not an option for the OP (emphasis mine):

 

Unless you work in hazard environment or a moron, its not easy to damage the drive these days.

 

dragon, you're wrong: we don't have to do anything these days - a drive can do damage to itself, by design.

Today's SSD examples are the OCZ or any SF based drives.

Yesteryear's HDD examples included the Seagate 7200.4's, the Hitachi 'DeathStar' and the infamous Maxtor line of (40GB?) drives that could self destruct while you were building a system.

Not easy to damage a drive - but that doesn't mean that some are not more robust/reliable than others.

 

mvalpreda,

What would make you think the C300 is not reliable? 12 months and running on the C300 [FW] 0007 - It has been rock solid in terms of BOTH performance and reliability on SATA 3Gbps.

In regards to RAID based laptops, while none use a TRUE RAID controller (fake-raid), there are plenty of gaming/dtr machines out there with multiple drive bays. Some even allow up to 4 drive bays.

 

I'm running my 2 SATA II(3GB/s) SSDs in RAID0 and get the speed of a SATAIII(6GB/s) SSD with a PM45 chipset with only SATA II ports.

 

maximinimaus,

How long have you had this setup? Have you written/deleted enough data on the RAID volume to trigger the write-amplification problem due to lack of TRIM?

 

How can I check the write-amplification problem?
I think I don't write enough data to trigger it.
As I try very often new drivers, primarily Nvidia graphic driver and Intel Rapid Storage, I often restore my partitions with a previously taken image.
From time to time I do a Secure Erase to restore the performance.
I've done today some benchmarks to check it and got with ATTO bench more than 500MB/s writes and more than 300 MB/s reads(sequential).

 

I disagree. This is not Sandforce we are talking about.

 

Cloudfire, no, this time I agree with saturnotaku.

It is not the actual drives that make RAID0 risky - it is the fact they are in RAID in the first place.

 

So what are the probability of one drive failing thus leaving the other one in dust? I think in reality it is low. Especially with Marvel controllers and the rating thus far

 

maximinimaus,

you would see performance degrade. AFAIK, the latest (10.6.0.1022) RST drivers do not support TRIM over RAID. So, over time, as more and more NAND cells are left "dirty", you will have write performance problems. If you have large SSDs or leave the machine idle for GC, and write little to the disk, you may never encounter a performance problem.


Cloudfire,
Dunno the exact probability, but you do increase it. For example, a 2 drive RAID0 volume is ~2x the risk of failure of a single drive. A 5 drive RAID0 volume is just under 5x the risk of failure of a single drive. Calculation is (1.0 - prob-of-failure)^(# of drives)

 

I don't think it's more risky than a one disk system.
If the disk or the RAID0 fails, in any case you have to restore them with a backup. In both cases you will loose data. Therefore it's a matter of a backup and recovery strategy for both. As I always have a working image for a one SSD(AHCI) Windows, identical to my RAID0 Windows, I can easily restore the OS and the data partition on the working SSD, as I always keep my data separated from the OS. And I do regular backups to an external drive. So I'm back again within a short time.

 

latest IRST is 10.6.2.1001, but you're right up to now TRIM over RAID is not supported.
I don't know if and how Samsung implemented GC on my 470 SSDs, I think I read somewhere they did. I also don't know when GC kicks in, surely not by doing a Logoff. In my opinion this is a myth!
If I notice a performance degradation, I take images of my partitions, SE both SSDs, define the RAID again and restore the images.
This is done within 1/2 hours.

 

In regards to the risk... It is all probability. For instance, assume for this argument, drive failure is 2%. That means the probability of of success of your system is 98%. With two drives, this falls to 96.04%. As you add more and more drives, the mathematical probability of failure increases.

In regards to GC, I believe most drives are designed to do this when there is no disk activity. What ppl have posted is when you log off, there is more chance of disk activity. Although I don't know how that can be the case because of other services running on the machine.

You can do that in 30 minutes? What tool are you using to securely erase the drives?

 

I'm using the tool DriveSnapShot to image my partitions. They are about 15 GB each. I can image both online within Windows(even the OS-partition) or offline after booting CC7PE(a follow up of Win7RescuePE, derived from the Windows 7 Preinstallation Environment) from a USB-Stick. The tool has a very good compression ratio, better than the last version 15.0 of Norton Ghost. It takes about 3 min for C: and about 4 min for D: (contains more uncompressable data).
Then I boot Ubuntu from a USB-stick, do first a "suspend" and after "resume" the SSDs have the attribute "not frozen", so I can SE them within Ubuntu via hdparm. This takes about 5 sec for every SSD.
Then I boot again with the CC7PE USB-stick, during the boot the Raid has to be defined via "CTRL - I". I define the partitions with diskpart(formatting is not necessary) and restore the images, which takes about the same time as taking them. After finishing Windows is ready for booting. When it's up, I have to activate the Write Back Cache with the IRST console.
That's it.

 

Cool.

Hmmm... Do you know if hdparm actually sets the NAND cells flag for empty? I've been reading some posts where you should check to see if your manufacturer has a wiping tool. In my case (C300), it doesn't look like one exists, but some people are recommending 'Sanitary Erase' and others hdderase. Although to me, it looks like you would brick your drive using the OCZ based Sanitary Erase on a Crucial SSD.

In any case, thanks for sharing your process.

 

I just googled for Sanitary Erase and it seems it is especially for specific OCZ SSDs. I wouldn't use it for another brand.
HDDERASE is the same as Security Erase issued via hdparm.
I assume hdparm resets all NAND cells to empty as after the Secure Erase the RAID0-information stored on each SSD is no longer available. The Intel Raid Rom sees the 2 SSDs as normal SATA drives, not involved in a Raid-array.

 

Thx.

10char

 

Wow, talk about a thread wandering off topic!

To the OP, I upgraded one of my C300s to an M4. Is it faster yes. Quite a bit particularly with the M4 at 009 firmware. Do I really notice it? Probably not but it is quite a bit faster on small files and a ton faster on sequentials.

So if money is not the problem, go ahead and try an M4, you will like it.

Perry

 

The Crucial M4 with firmware 009 is definitely faster than Crucial C300. The real life performance difference is too small to notice in most situations. Not worth the upgrade, in my opinion.

The M4 does have slightly lower power consumption.

 

Thanks for the input all. I have been happy with my C300 and the reliability has been fine. I know jclausius asked why I thought the C300 was not reliable...but never said that. I was just saying I wanted a drive that was reliable. Maybe I'll replace my C300 with an M4 and move my C300 down to my wife's machine...she already got my hand-me-down Intel 160GB X25-M G2.

 

To me it looked as though you were moving due to a reliability issue. Sorry for the misinterpretation. Good luck w/ the new drive.