64Gb Crucial m4 vs 256Gb Crucial m4

[UnluckyXIII]

Hey guys,

I'm trying to decide on what I should do with the SSDs in my new set up, would I be better to have a 64Gb m4 as dedicated boot drive and then the 256Gb m4 for games or would I getter a better experience using the 256Gb m4 as my boot drive and for my games??

Thanks

 

[bobusboy]

You will notice a major speed difference when it comes to installing and loading anything installed on the SSD.

IMO SSDs are not worth it for anything other than the OS installation. So go with the 64 gig and then get a 1-3 TB HDD for your games and applications; or get a few HDDs and set up a raid 0 or 0+1 and get speeds which rival SSDs.

 

[Delengowski]

Whats your reasoning for SSD not being worth it for executable files?

 

[bobusboy]

Had one, sold it to a buddy as I didn't really notice a difference in load times between it and RAID 0.

YMMV.

 

[nukemaster]

It will all depend on what you do. larger drive tend to use more memory channels on the controller allowing for faster speeds(in this case mostly with write speeds).

As for the speed boost, While HDD's in raid CAN match the pure sequential read/write speeds. They still fall WAY behind in terms of access times(random write/reads). This is what SSD's shine at.

Now this is not to say that you can not say that a hard drive is just as fast for a given use.

For instance, if you game and the games you play are either highly compressed or use sequential reads. The hard drive may come very close to or match/beat the SSD[hard drives can write fast as they read SSD's not always]. The reason is that if a game is very compressed, the cpu may limit the overall read speeds and with sequential reads, hard drives in raid CAN keep up.

If you on the other hand have a game or application that makes use of many small random reads/writes, the SSD will CRUSH the hard drive. It is all a matter of a SSD taking almost no time to get to the next random place vs a hard drives arm having to move and waiting for it to spin to the right place on the disk(all adds latency).

You will also come across games that wait for all players to load before letting anyone in. By this point, your system is just waiting for others anyway.

All answers are fully correct.

What I do like about the M4 is that its performance is not based on compression like sandforce, so the performance is more constant, but with compressible data, sandforce is still king.

SSD reliability still worries me a bit even more so with the newer smaller(nm) nand having a lower number or erase cycles.

It is also quite a trade off for space vs speed