C300 128GB or m4 128GB

[Slothy]

Hello,

I've finally started seeing the m4 available online (for us Canucks), with the 128GB m4 going for about $10 less than the same capacity C300. I know the box numbers show ~20% improvement in read performance, but Tom's review also showed substantial degredation in read performance as the drive filled up. Further, I plan on using this a lot for working on multiple VMs, so the higher I/O of the C300 seems to work in it's favour.

Does anyone have numbers for a C300 in the same or similar test? Also, has anyone seen further information on 25nm durability?

Any advice, suggestions or personal experience would welcomed.

Thanks,
-Slothy

 

[paullyh]

Hello,

I've finally started seeing the m4 available online (for us Canucks), with the 128GB m4 going for about $10 less than the same capacity C300. I know the box numbers show ~20% improvement in read performance, but Tom's review also showed substantial degredation in read performance as the drive filled up. Further, I plan on using this a lot for working on multiple VMs, so the higher I/O of the C300 seems to work in it's favour.

Does anyone have numbers for a C300 in the same or similar test? Also, has anyone seen further information on 25nm durability?

Any advice, suggestions or personal experience would welcomed.

Thanks,
-Slothy

Anyone with a detailed M4 vs C300 review/comparison, please under Windows XP and Windows 7?

 

[Slothy]

Not to revive an old thread but to give some sort of answer here - I ended up getting a C300 128GB vs the relativley new and untested M4 128GB (at the time of my purchase), while my friend bought the M4 128GB some number of months later. We have virtually identical builds, and from a performance standpoint these may as well be interchangeable. Load times in games are a toss-up for who loads fastest, and I've put my SSD through the paces, running multiple file-intensive operations (performing multiple file transfer and copy operations over network, USB and to my RAID array, unzipping a .7z archive, and burning an ISO all at the same time while launching Firefox and other programs) not as a stress test but just as normal operation, and and it handled it with any noticeable degredation of performance. Worth noting - I initially installed and mounted this drive as a folder within another volume and placed my games on there. It was faster than a HDD, sure - but after redoing my install to use it as my system drive, it is considerably faster - not just for loading the OS, but even for launching my applications that previously were stored on there anyways. One thing I might caution - if you're going to be dealing with adding and removing content from large archive files, you may find yourself burning through the life of your SSD faster than intended, as it will have to extract all that information out to disk before recalculating/recompressing the archive and writing *that* back to disk as well. From this perspective, perhaps using volume compression within Windows would be a better option than storing everything in a large (ie. 15 GB+) archives.

As Tom's has started saying - fast SSD or slow SSD, it still isn't a mechanical HDD, and that's what makes all the difference.

 

[Slothy]

Best answer selected by Slothy.

 

[paullyh]

Not to revive an old thread but to give some sort of answer here - I ended up getting a C300 128GB vs the relativley new and untested M4 128GB (at the time of my purchase), while my friend bought the M4 128GB some number of months later. We have virtually identical builds, and from a performance standpoint these may as well be interchangeable. Load times in games are a toss-up for who loads fastest, and I've put my SSD through the paces, running multiple file-intensive operations (performing multiple file transfer and copy operations over network, USB and to my RAID array, unzipping a .7z archive, and burning an ISO all at the same time while launching Firefox and other programs) not as a stress test but just as normal operation, and and it handled it with any noticeable degredation of performance. Worth noting - I initially installed and mounted this drive as a folder within another volume and placed my games on there. It was faster than a HDD, sure - but after redoing my install to use it as my system drive, it is considerably faster - not just for loading the OS, but even for launching my applications that previously were stored on there anyways. One thing I might caution - if you're going to be dealing with adding and removing content from large archive files, you may find yourself burning through the life of your SSD faster than intended, as it will have to extract all that information out to disk before recalculating/recompressing the archive and writing *that* back to disk as well. From this perspective, perhaps using volume compression within Windows would be a better option than storing everything in a large (ie. 15 GB+) archives.

As Tom's has started saying - fast SSD or slow SSD, it still isn't a mechanical HDD, and that's what makes all the difference.

Thanks for your further feedback. This is interesting.
However, initially, you pointed out these concerns at the beginning of the thread:

"Further, I plan on using this a lot for working on multiple VMs, so the higher I/O of the C300 seems to work in it's favour.
"

Did you actually tested those scenario with the M4 vs. C300?