best ssd under $140?

Currently I have a 60gb mushikin calisto which has been fairly reliable. I am looking to get another ssd under $140 ~120gb and there are simply too many options to choose from. Which one do you guys know as the best out of the following (in terms of performance and such)

 

Crucial M4 is around $130 now, maybe even lower. Check out the deals section of the forum.

 

I've had the Chronos since it's release about 9 months ago and haven't run into a single problem. If I were to go back in time I would've bought the M4 though.. just because of it's track record

 

for the M4 when I look at the sequential read/write speed, it's rated lower than all the other ssd's (415mb/s and 175/s)....isn't it slower than others then?

 

Nothing noticeable and it also depends on the benchmarks, take a look at Crystal Disk Mark benchmarks for the M4 vs any Sandforce drive and the M4 will destroy SF simply Sandforce doesn't do so well with incompressible data.

Oh and here's the M4 64GB on SATA 3, writes will of course be better on the 128GB, but that shows the usual speeds are definitely there:

 

you aint going to notice at all

 

You can get an M4 for under $140 and I've even seen Samsung 830's under $140. I would recommend those over any of the the SSDs in your poll

 

The M4 is $124 at Amazon with free shipping. Can't beat that.

Amazon.com: Crucial 128 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT128M4SSD2: Electronics

 

Your access time is dictated by the random read/write, not the sequential. In which case, the CRUCIAL (not Corsair) M4 is the hands-down winner for that price point.

 

The M4 also had a firmware update late last summer that boosted speeds immensely (up over 500MB/s Sequential Read per Tijo's pic above), including 4ks. I don't think this got updated in the published specs anywhere.

Crucial M4 or Samsung 830 are the SSDs I'd be looking to get if I were in the market right now.

 

Thanks a bunch for the info guys. Since the over all consensus seemed to favor the m4, I took it! cost me only $115 Canadian including tax!!! so much cheaper than the 60gb mushikin calisto that I bought for $170 2yrs ago

 

That would be the Crucial M4....and lucky for it, the OCZ Vertex4 is currently $150. The Vertex 4 is faster, but it does need to come down in price a little. It's relatively new though, while the M4 has been around a while.

It's starting to get to the point where most users won't notice the difference, unless the random speeds are massively different. Unless one is running a DB server off of it anyway...

 

Just FYI, but coming from a hard drive to any SSD is going to result in a huge difference regardless of what brand you buy. The difference in 4K access times is mostly academic now. Going with better $/GB and a reliable drive is priority, not raw access times at the cost of a drive that BSOD's three times a day.

 

I picked up the 128GB Crucial M4 on shell-shocker today =D, it should come in some time near the end of the week.

 

$100?! dayum I thought I got it cheap...but then again you are in the US

 

'Twas a good deal indeed. They sold out fast as they should have.

 

Is it really faster at 128GB? It's rated at same 200MBps write as m4 and every marvell baased drive has reads of ~500MBps no matter what nand it uses or it's capacity.

 

The recent firmware update will increase both numbers. The disadvantage of a drive that's been around for a year or more is that by now firmware updates have wrung all of the performance they can out of it. Of course, the advantage is that those firmware updates have also worked out any bugs.

 

well, i missed big improvement announcement for 128gb one.

This sounds great, I only hope it's not related only to sequential write though. Amazing boost.

 

Samsung 128GB is for just $131 at newegg. You should take a look there.

 

I had the same drive, and bought Samsung 830 128GB SSD from Newegg since I was really going out of disk space and couldn't delete any more stuff. The ONLY factor I would look for in an SSD is reliability. Samsung 830 and Crucial M4 seem really good in that respect. The only reason I went with more expensive Samsung ($136 few days ago) is because it is 7mm thick and I might switch to a thinner laptop (Thinkpad X230), that can only support 7mm drives. I didn't go for higher capacity because I simply don't never needed it, even on my gaming computer.

Unless you will be measuring things with a stopwatch in miliseconds, don't expect to see any difference in day to days work in speed from your Mushkin and any of the latest SSDs.