$410.99
www.crucial.com
Speed. The holidays are all about speed. If you doubt, go to any Target or Wal-Mart on the afternoon December 24th. You will witness one of two possible speeds at play: frantic sprinting and dead, bottlenecked stop. Those of us still running hard disks as our primary boot volumes are well acquainted with the latter—we experience it with every reboot. We wait from two to four minutes for Windows to creep through its loading, staring at that little four-color Windows icon on its empty backdrop like the world’s last Christmas light pulsing feebly against a sea of black despair. This is why so many of us have adopted SSDs over the last year or two, even if they had to be low-capacity cheapies. But 40 or 80 GB of C: space erodes sooner than anyone expects, and things...start to...slow...dowwwn. Again.

So welcome Crucial’s 256 GB m4, aggressively street priced at under $1.50 per gigabyte. In addition to hitting the pricing sweet spot, the 256 GB m4 model also offers the best performance specs from the four-model m4 roster at the lowest price point: 40K random read IOPS, 50K random write IOPS, sequential reads of up to 415 MB/s, and sequential writes of up to 260 MB/s. Crucial (which is the consumer arm of Micron, which in turn is 51% of the NAND partnership between Micron and Intel) backs the 6 Gb/s SATA interface with Marvell’s 9174 controller. SandForce fans may be put off by this, and it’s true that several SandForce-based drives, especially the OCZ Vertex 3, do eke out performance wins over the m4, depending on the workload. On the other hand, the 240 GB Vertex 3 currently costs around $1.80 per gigabyte, and we’ve seen fewer reliability concerns over time with Crucial’s design.
We should point out that even though 256 GB remains fairly spacious in 2011 SSD terms, this is not meant for primary storage. Crucial’s 256 GB will hold your OS (maybe even a couple of them) and plenty of apps, but expect to bring up a separate volume for storage. Right now, we’re partial to Western Digital’s 2 TB Caviar Black WD2002FAEX (SATA 6 Gb/s interface). Two of these in a RAID 1 get you 2 TB of mirrored security and a great complement to the m4’s blistering performance. That’s a lot of bytes to put under one tree, but a well-rounded storage strategy is going to give the most satisfaction long-term.
- CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition
- Motherboard: MSI 990FXA-GD80
- Memory: PNY XLR8 MD8192KD3-1600-X9
- Power Supply: SilverStone Strider Gold Evolution 1000 W
- SSD: Crucial m4 256 GB
- Graphics Card: Gigabyte GV-R695OC-1D
- CPU: Intel Core i7-3930K
- Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme
- Memory: G.Skill RipjawsZ F3-17000CL9Q-16GBZHD (4 GB x 4)
- Chassis: SilverStone Raven RV03
- Zotac Infinity Edition ZT-50102-30P GeForce GTX 580
- Noctua NH-D14 SE2011
- Creative Labs Recon3D PCI Express Fatal1ty Professional Edition

Mine was the one with the 4 SSD.
My floppy disk totally turned to a hard disk drive.
I can't wait for part 2 already.
Depends on if you use an aftermarket cooler or the stock one
Why are some things suggested in this guide mostly the worst value you could get for that sum of cash?
For starters:
-MSI 990FX-GD80 wouldn't be my top pick. That would go to a Gigabyte 990FXA-UD(x) board. Why bother getting a board that's more expensive than the best processor for the platform (or one whose lower-end boards don't catch fire).
-i7-3930K? Ivy's just around the corner and will run on 150 dollar boards that do more than X79 could think of.
-Silverstone 1000W PSU? Seasonic's already got their X-1050, which has 80+ Platinum certification instead of gold for the same cost.
Some things I guess I just don't understand, then. You list some parts that have really good value, such as that RAM and Powercolor graphics card along with the 955BE, and then go to the polar opposite. I don't see the reason for that.
Get a life you freak
Get a sense of humor you rude little man.