From my limited research it seems the main improvements to SSDs since the M4 has been transfer speeds. As someone who just browses the web and use Excel, I don't see myself taking advantage of increased transfer speeds. Access times probably won't be noticeable though since SSDs are so quick already right?
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Any reason to upgrade from a Crucial M4 256GB?
- Thread starter tracerit
- Start date
let me tell j00 from personal experience..and SSD is an SSD.
Yes, the latest and greatest may give you double the benchmark speeds...but let's say I give you 2 laptops, one with your Crucial M4 256 GB and one with my 1 TB EVO. I bet you wouldn't be able to tell the difference which laptop had which SSD. They feel exactly the same, so from a real world usage side, don't bother. if you want benchmarks to brag, then sure get another SSD 🙂
Yes, the latest and greatest may give you double the benchmark speeds...but let's say I give you 2 laptops, one with your Crucial M4 256 GB and one with my 1 TB EVO. I bet you wouldn't be able to tell the difference which laptop had which SSD. They feel exactly the same, so from a real world usage side, don't bother. if you want benchmarks to brag, then sure get another SSD 🙂
not at all man, I had a LiteON 256 GB SSD that came preinstalled in an ASUS laptop. It was a very basic drive which never had even any firmware updates.
So I upgraded to the latest 1 TB Samsung EVO 840 (I bought 2 of them) expecting that I am going to get even faster performance and have the same shock in awe that I felt when I upgraded from an HDD to an SSD the first time..............nope.........my system didn't feel one bit different, even the boot time is the same.....
as long as you don't kill your SSD by doing the wrong thingsd such as defragging it, shrink your page file, disable indexing, leave an unpartioned space of 10% at least for Overprovisioning (garbage collection), then your SSD will last you very long, is very reliable, and fast as any current SSDs.
Want more re-assurance? I even tried to put both my 1 TB Samsung 840 EVO in RAID 0 mode. Yes, my benchmarks doubled, but I didn't get one bit of a performance feel, the snappiness was the same, load times of my browser, office apps, etc, was the same.
Verdict: an SSD is an SSD, the SSD wars are only for bragging rights which is pointless and for kids.
In your situation, there isn't any reason to upgrade.
This is pretty much my take on SSDs nowadays. They're all quick enough to give subjectively the same experience. Now it's about how much storage space you want, how much $$$ you want to pay, and reliability of the drive.
BrightCandle
Diamond Member
The Crucial m4 is of the generation of SSDs that maxed out SATA 6 on read performance, so its already there or thereabouts with the top contenders in a lot of aspects. Its not got lots of IO capability and it can't max out the write speed and its certainly not consistent but in desktop use you don't really notice. I compile a lot of code and an SSD, any SSD makes quite a difference. But I can't distinguish any performance difference between an Intel 80GB Gen 1 drive running over eSATA compared to the M4, in that activity they are identical and I am CPU dominated. When you look at the file copy benchmarks the differences are normally quite small, there just isn't a lot to separate the various SSDs. If you were accessing a database or running a web server then the differences are very tangible, but at Queue Depth 1 (usual desktop workload) the differences between the drivers are minimal.
You also have a decent size SSD, which is really the one reason you might want to upgrade it. At 256GB you have got enough space to store quite a bit on it without having spent tonnes of money (unlikely me I spent a small fortune on the 512GB one but it was cheap relative to other SSDs at the time, below £1 a GB). Nowadays you can get a 512GB mx100 drive for £120, so there is certainly the opportunity to get more consistent performance (if that ever bothers you, mine does bother me sometimes) for a lot less than you paid for 256GB.
I suspect the next time you (and I) will feel compelled to upgrade is with the PCI-E/M2/Sata Express drives. They will offer a very real doubling or more of throughput performance and IOs which is definitely going to be at noticeable levels, although will it really impact my work applications? I doubt it, I will probably only notice in installs and other throughput heavy activities like copying files.
You also have a decent size SSD, which is really the one reason you might want to upgrade it. At 256GB you have got enough space to store quite a bit on it without having spent tonnes of money (unlikely me I spent a small fortune on the 512GB one but it was cheap relative to other SSDs at the time, below £1 a GB). Nowadays you can get a 512GB mx100 drive for £120, so there is certainly the opportunity to get more consistent performance (if that ever bothers you, mine does bother me sometimes) for a lot less than you paid for 256GB.
I suspect the next time you (and I) will feel compelled to upgrade is with the PCI-E/M2/Sata Express drives. They will offer a very real doubling or more of throughput performance and IOs which is definitely going to be at noticeable levels, although will it really impact my work applications? I doubt it, I will probably only notice in installs and other throughput heavy activities like copying files.
Totally agree with you man.
What's worse, these benchmarks are only gimmicks, proof?
In AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark, my 1TB evo scores an average of 500 MB/S for write speed. Great right?
Well guess what? I just tried copying around 320 GB of files from my C: partition to my D partition, C: partition is my 1st 1TB Evo and 2nd partition is my 2nd 1TB Evo, they are both connected to SATA 3 ports, and I only got a real world speed of around 320 MB/S. Nowhere near the benchmarks, so the benchmark are really pointless and I don't understand the logic behind them when real world usage varies by a great mile.
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blastingcap
Diamond Member
You'll find little difference in a blind taste test with M4 vs the latest and greatest consumer SSD. Enterprise grade SSDs have added extras like endurance, more overprovisioning, micro-capacitors in case of pwoer outages or whatever (my M4 survived plenty of power outages w/o corruption, though), and longer warranties/support.
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BrightCandle
Diamond Member
Because you are reading and writing to the same drive you should be aware you are basically splitting the bandwidth there, the same device is doing both things. The benchmarks only test one aspect in isolation, you are testing reading and writing at the same time. If you want to simulate what the Benchmark does simply move your file into a RAM disk and copy it out of that and onto the SSD and it will show you ~500MB/s writes.
no as I said I was moving 325 GB from C: which is my 1st Samsung 840 EVO drive to D Partition which is a separate second 1 TB Samsung 840 EVO so how is the bandwidth split?
BrightCandle
Diamond Member
My mistake.
no problem
It was a mix of small files like documents, a bit larger like MP3s, and huge files like movies.
when it was transferring the small files the speed was horrible around 170 MB/S. Only when it reached to copying the movies and the large PSD files did the speed jump up to 340 MB/S. But that isn't even close to the benchmark results 🙁
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