Which 240gb SSD should i buy out of these 3?

Hi, im looking to upgrade to a 240gb SSD and I had 3 in mind but am unsure which is best suited to my m18xr1 2720qm 8gb ram 6970m cs laptop, all the reviews point in different directions thought id come see the experts. The SSD in mind are Kingston Hyperx, OCZ Vertex 3 and OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS. If the laptop has the power I would probably looking to purchase another 1 further down the line for raid 0 aswell even though its overkill.

kind regards Euan

 

As all of those are SF (SandForce) based, I wouldn't recommend any of them.

Intel 510 Series 250GB model would be my only (current) choice for a SATA3 SSD.

Good luck.

 

How does the Intel 510 compare speed wise to those 3?

 

In real world use? Equal to or better.

In benchmarks? lol... yeah lies, statistics and benchmarks... lol...

 

None of those 3 are recommended. As Tiller said, all are Sandforce and Sandforce drives are bad news these days...the Intel 510 would serve your purposes very nicely, and there is little real-life usage difference in speeds. The same goes for the Crucial M4. Either one of those drives would be your best bet. Actually, with the newer 0009 firmware for the M4, it is actually the fastest of all SSDs in real-life usage patterns in many cases.

 

+1. I have one of these. And although my laptop is SATA II, I am very pleased with it.

 

hmmm crucial m4 256gb nearly $200 cheaper then the intel 510 250gb, i will prolly be going for the M4, no one seems to be on the side of any of the original drives i was after lol

kind regards Euan

 

i would definitely go for M4...........

 

M4 for the win

 

Crucial M4 256GB. As fast as the Sandforce drives but cheaper, bigger and more reliable.

 

Intel 510 (mine while only 120GB has been perfect from day one).
Crucial M4-Same as Intel 510 but cheaper.

Either one will work.

 

The crowd has spoken, i was hoping to hear better things about the kingston hyperx 240gb (only one i can get till mid week) but the M4 squad have me taken and i will wait till the stock comes in hopefully mid this week. thanks heaps for the responses.

kind regards Euan

 

Can the Crucial m4 256gb SSD surivive in raid 0 with another to make 512gb, strange question but other forums whenever i type in 256 raid 0 or 512gb raid 0 they just want to tell me about the 128gb in raid 0 to make 256 or it shows me a 512gb ssd which didnt help lol. Does anyone have any info for raiding 2 256 m4s or would 1 512gb(or 256gb) and wd scorpio black 750gb be enough. I havent seen any benchmarks for 2 256 m4 in raid 0 keen to look at the overall score. Sorry for rambling i had surgery today and im a little groggy I cant get my m4 till wednesday/thursday was looking forward to the distraction earlier so im hoping some eyes still scan through this. Thanks heaps everyone you havent steered me wrong so far.

kind regards Euan

 

I know of no reason you couldn't RAID0 two M4's (assuming your system/platform supports RAID of course).

However, what is your reasoning for wanting this RAID? Are you editing RAW Hi-Def video? Do you need (R/W sequential) speeds greater than what a single M4 can provide? Is it simply bragging rights?

If you really need the higher sequentials, I would recommend looking at the Intel 510 250GB model instead - if you need sequentials and the high capacity... again, I would recommend two of the Intels first (much higher write speeds...) - but not in RAID0.

If you don't have a specific reason for wanting RAID0, then I suggest don't bother with the hassles and headaches that a RAID can inflict on you and your system.

The best bang for the buck is a 256GB M4 (or Intel 250GB 510 Series) along with either the Scorpio Black 750GB (noisier) or the Hitachi 7K50 750GB HDD. Anything above that is not getting you more performance: it is simply getting you more capacity (and in the case of the SSD; more free space to allow the SSD to do it's GC routines more efficiently).

If you can limit yourself to ~100GB or so of SSD capacity out of the 256GB nominally available (and if you move the Users folder with the following link, I think you can do so easily) then you will have a fast system that won't need any updating (hardware-wise) for a very long time. At least, not your storage subsystem anyways.

By using less than half of your SSD's capacity (by simply partitioning it to a smaller size) you will ensure that it will stay as fast as the day you bought it - for the life of your system.

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...rades/608752-hdd-partitioning-help-500gb.html


Look for my posts in the above thread starting at post #3 on how to move the Users folder to the drive or partition you want (in this case to the Scorpio Black 750GB drive).

 

What I am doing with my M4(replaced the x25m), need 60-70G, the rest are occasional spike(delete after short term use).

 

So over provisioning is still good?? i though was only on Gen1 ssds.

 

Yep, it's still good. Things are better with newer gen SSDs, but it's still best to over provision them. Personally, i try not to go over 50% capacity.

 

Yes, OP always give the controller more head room to fine tune its 'GC/defrag' regardless of TRIM.

Though Intel's study based on its x25m controller is that the effect begins to deminishing passing 30% or so. On my old 25m, I set it at 20% which to me is the sweet spot, but if you have more space to spare it doesn't hurt.

Please note that by OP, I don't really mean 'unallocated' space but just free space(so long you have TRIM). IOW, if you are only using 50% of the space and you have TRIM, it is the same as leave 50% space unallocated(and thus not usable by OS).

 

So you have 3 partitions on your X25m? one with 100mg os reserve, 2nd with 80% of the drive space, where everthing goes and 3rd partition with 20% of the space unformated/unallocated?

 

No. I only do partitioning for my HDD(I have multiple machines). My x25m is only 80G, one partition and I leave 10G unlocated because the size is too tight for me to keep on reminding myself to clean up. So I deliberately leave that size not use. Not so after my change to M4, just allocate all spaces.

 

i know its not in your options but id opt for the ever so reliable m4 its fairly cheaper too i believe.

 

Hmm what i had done before even consulting you guys was buy 1 kingston hyperx 120gb ssd and western digital scorpio black 750gb. I then thought lets see what this raid thing is all about having spare cash i bought another Kingston. 223.6gb total space is not much room to use up with the amount of different games I play which is all this laptop is for. Crucial m4 256gb is $460, intel 510 250gb $639, Kingston hyperx 240gb $565. So far my raided kingstons fly but i know the space will fill up very soon especially with Diablo 3 on the horizon and my addiction to downloaded Steam games lol. Is the kingston sandforce controller such a terrible issue to change to a straight 240gb I would still be playing with fire? is the Intel 510 really worth $180 more then the crucial m4 when almost everyone says they do the same thing and most benchmarks say the same? I await your combined wisdom hopefully i havent left anything out this time and hopefully people still looking a this.

kind regards Euan

 

The Sandforce issue is something you may or may not get, but if you do get it, there's no way to get rid of it. That's why we tell people to avoid Sandforce. That and declining sales will force Sandforce and manufacturers to actually fix the problem.

 

one aspect of people getting intel is its realibility is very high...if you ask me, if intel 510 is worth the money. for me it's not, Crucial M4 is a good combination of realibility and money and speed. that's why i purchasing it. others might say otherwise
if you get a M4 it's really rare to get a faulty one... even if you get that, just RMA it and get a new one.

 

I am not sure about 510 but between M4 and 320, I think M4 is better in terms of reliability as it doesn't have an known issue unlike 320 where the 8M bug seems to be still there.

 

Didn't the firmware fix that issue?

 

Apparently, a few users are still being affected.

 

I think I may have to take back my recommendation(well at least with a warning) about M4.

A few minutes ago, I am encountering a total freeze of my system, it is not bug or anything of the OS as it still response to keyboard/mouse but I cannot launch anything. Looking at the disk light, it is in a constant on state for may be 10 seconds or so. Then it went off and I regain control of my system. The disk activity(which usually shows OS related read/write) shows nothing special.

So I have high suspicion that this is the M4's own internal thing that stalled me. Never experience this befor in the x25m.

Will observe to see if it is a repeated issue.

 

I haven't heard of any stutter issues with firmware 009. This is the first time.

Is this on a clean install?

 

No it is not a clean install but that doesn't matter. as I just transfer my x25m image to m4 (80G->128G) so there are lots of free space left and to the SSD, it doesn't matter if it is fresh install as the Nand has only been written once during the transfer.

 

I have no issues with my M4 with fw0009, but I did a clean install, running intel rst.

 

No issues here, one comp running RST, the other on stock MS drivers.

 

Chimpanzee, if you want to make sure it's the m4 at fault it does matter.

 

no it doesn't.

To the M4, I have written just that many sectors to it. It doesn't know the file structure as it has no concept of that. TRIM was and is on, the driver(Intel) is the same. Everything is the same.

A 'clean' OS install would only have more random write to the drive, not less.

And I would not re-install everything just to make sure. I am not a reviewer about the drive and would not spend the time for that. If it happens again(repeatedly), it is quite reasonable to think the drive is the problem because I did the same thing(from HDD to x25m) and never saw this for the past 12 month or so.

I posted just a FYI.

 

I say it does but lets disagree.

I'll be very interested to see if the problem persists and if you will then ' blame' the m4.

 

If the problem persist, I will blame it for sure. My rule is simple, no HDD/SSD needs TLC other than simple and standard precaution.

I upgrade the firmware before I do the image restore. I quick format it under W7 which would pass on TRIM info to the drive. I checked the TRIM and alignment after the transfer.

Everything is ok.

If it does need 'clean install'(which I see no logic reason at the drive level but lets leave it there) in order to have 'no problem'. This would not be the drive I would recommend.

To restore my current working environment(which has accumuated for over 3 years) from clean install would take at least 2-3 days which can afford me to buy quite some SSD as this is a work machine and I have to count the hour loss at charged rate.

 

I can't really expand because I'm on a small phone but keep us posted if the clean install fixed the issue, if there is one.

 

I would but don't expect a clean install unless I am fedup with the SSD and give it to someone else and would have no chance of knowing if there is any difference.

 

chimpanzee, three years worth of 'accumulated' stuff?

Time for a clean install - for your sake - not the SSD's.

 

Noop. no clean install. I don't care about that tiny little bit of performance gain.

When I say 3 years worth of 'accumulated stuff', I mean programs installed over the period(and tweaking). To get start, 3 version of SQL server, 2 version of visual studio, 2 version of expression blend and a number of other aux stuff. Just taking a stock count can take a few hours.

It is in a state of maximum efficiency/productivity(so I can get everything I want to open the way they are) but no actual data that I am worry about.

Given the choice of re-install vs just buying another SSD(make that a dozen), buying still makes more sense to me.

In fact, if this machine slow down, I would not spend the time to find out why but just throw more expensive hardware to it until I can't.

EDIT:
and none of my machines' performance degrade over time for the past 10 years or so and I used them for ~5+ years before switching to new one.

 

chimpanzee, understood.

 

I require a fresh install at least every 2 years. It is amazing the clutter and crap that accumulates.

I like my M4 just fine. Have 150GB free. i am not loading it up with crap I do not need like pron videos or music. I have plenty. Just not a collector.
And I do not benchmark more than twice.

Just my take on it. And I did buy this SSD to do the fresh install. I now have a "spare" Intel 160GB 320. Ah, life is good