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Review – A Crucial Solid-State Drive Selection

Windows 7 + SSD = Blazing Fast! Does it matter if this flash-based drive is installed on the top-of-the-line ancient Acer Aspire 1410-2990 netbook, which…

First up — selecting & ordering a solid-state drive (SSD), or flash-based drive, that met the requirements and budget. The current drive is a Western Digital Scorpio Blue with 250 GB of capacity — unfortunately, most ~256 GB SSDs cost at least $400. Given the current drive contained about 100 GB of apps and data after simple pruning, that left drives having 128 GB capacity – spending $3,000 or more on 1 TB drives was out of the question (some folks can obtain SSD-based solutions & such capacities via so-called hybrid drives – more background info here).

Pre-purchase info was collected during the last few weeks months years with respect to evolving considerations about SATA II / SATA III SSD performance, drive stability, & price — these SSD candidates survived:

Primary factors to consider for these candidate drives included:

  • Size – storage capacity – 120 GB vs. 128 GB vs. 160 GB
  • Simplicity – vendor-provided disk cloning transfer kit solution
  • Speed – SATA II (SATA 2.0, 3 Gb/s) vs. SATA III (SATA 3.0, 6 Gb/s)
  • Streaming – for non-contiguous file access during multi-tasking, esp. random read/write
  • Stability – is drive is expected to last a long time before “crashing”, re: here, here, or here

Further investigation revealed the netbook has an integrated Intel SATA III interface – barring showstoppers among other factors, the speed factor ruled out SATA II drives, which were originally included for being more cost-effective, and having a more extensive stability record with respect to SATA III SSDs. One factor down, four to go to further whittle down the surviving candidates:

Next up – size – although 8 GB doesn’t matter too much, it did offer a simple way to further trim [sic] the list (& also eliminate some of the newer drives which didn’t have much of a stability track record, particularly the Kingston & Silicon Power drives). I also wasn’t particularly keen on the OCZ Vertex based on historical stability performance, although its speed performance was hard to match. The Intel 120 GB was selected as the “Plan B” drive, which would require finding a data transfer kit if one of the remaining survivors didn’t make the cut:

Each of those remaining candidate drives is SATA III rated, supports the TRIM command to facilitate wear leveling (& minimize write amplification), includes a vendor-tested/supported data transfer kit, has 128 GB of storage capacity, and at the time of this writing, are priced within $20 of each other (or ~$200) via most suppliers. Since these three drives are roughly equivalent on size, simplicity, speed, differentiation will have to come via streaming &/or stability.

One consideration is that although the Samsung 470 drive has been noted for its stability, the Samsung 830 was officially released on October 24, 2011, too early to have an established track record. Similar consideration applies to the Kingston V200 , which was announced on November 9, 2011. These considerations, coupled with the significant streaming performance improvement during sequential and random read/writes for Crucial’s “Firmware Update Revision 0009” identified the drive-to-be, the Crucial M4.

Some final “retro-active” pre-purchase thought was again given to purchasing the Crucial M4 256 GB drive in lieu of the Crucial M4 128 GB drive, given the increase in performance. This improvement between ~128 GB SSDs and ~256 GB SSDs is also demonstrated by drives from other vendors, since bigger drives contain more chips (& hence can provide more bits per read/write.

However, doubling cost to the 256 GB drives was too much, especially given the purchase price of the netbook, and other upgrades, specifically, the recent 4 GB of RAM and a forthcoming 24” IPS monitor purchase. Thus, the Crucial M4 128 GB SSD was selected (& purchased via NewEgg) given the drive’s capabilities with respect to:

Coming soon…installation! Track our feed or follow @thoughtpuzzle on Twitter for the latest from the Thought Puzzle blog.

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