This should be a good deal with the high AU dollor, compare the price in Computer Stores in Australia.
The fastest SSD on the planet.
Groundbreaking SATA SSD performance
Read speeds up to 415MB/s
Second-generation SATA 6Gb/s w/ Native Command Queuing (3Gb/s backward compatible
not the vertex 3 128GB version.
it has the crippled 22nm chips/
so yeah its about the same speed if you compare the 128gb vertex 3 and m4 128gb.
The difference in speed between the two drives basically depends on which direction the wind is blowing. The vertex 3 may win out in the 256GB range with sequental compressable data, but that's about it (and who uses and SSD predominantly for copying 500mb+ COMPRESSIBLE files? no one).
40% more for an epeen stat that you'll never notice real world? Hah.
I will definitely admit it was a bit much for the OP to claim "Fastest SSD", but dependant on the stat it kind of is.
Also have a look at the 128GB m4 versus Vertex 3. The 128GB crucial has been benching higher than the 256, whereas the vertex 3 has been benching much, much lower.
Im pretty sure the Op just copied the text from crucial site…. not his own claim of fastest SSD.
Doesn't seem much cheaper… $289 from staticice and $259 from newegg (us)
~ $265 aus delivered (3 days) seems cheaper to me.
I reckon if you can get for $289, it might be worth considering, cos that would include GST, which you can claim back if used for work.
I am assuming easier to deal with a local company regd warranty/returns etc….
You'd trust some backyard joint with 2 employees over the company that actually manufactures them? Shipping also hasn't been taken in to account on that one (and the website is so bad I can't figure out where to calculate it).
Direct from Crucial won't be much of an issue for warranty and its not like the 8th largest semiconductor makers in the world will disappear overnight, more than you can say for most Australian internet companies.
Also assuming ~$10 for shipping, your looking at $40 more. And you get better service :S
not really sure how this is considered a legitimate bargain:
——- the product is on sale on the website at it's regular price with no special discounts
——- the product is relatively 'cheap' because of the strength of the current dollar allowing us to buy things closer to the US pricing.
If anything this is just an advertisement for the CRUCIAL online store and the 256gb model is the real bargain at $500 which is the best $/GB/perfomance you could find.
This is without a doubt the one to go with if your going for an SSD. Its a single step process delivered to your door (took 2 days for me to get mine) and you get a warranty and the product direct from crucial.
Thanks, you just answered some of my concerns about shipping delay and warranty. But how does it get here so fast from the US and through Customs?
UPS are pretty amazing, a weblink is worth a thousand words:
http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processRequest?HTMLVersio…
Just open the "Shipment Progress" section and keep in mind it's local times (so it left 2 am Tuesday our time).
Can always head on over to Whirlpools discussion thread for more info:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1674119&p…
Newegg doesn't even ship internationally so how is that a valid comparison unless you add all the shipping and handling costs of a forwarder? The staticice price for Gamedude also does not include shipping but assuming it is another $10 or $15, I agree that the difference is probably not enough considering the extra delay and risk (and possible warranty problems).
?
What's the warranty like? Very tempted to get one. Would we have to send it back if it fails, or is there a local distributor?
Also if anyone wants to know about the performance, check out the real-world benchmarks over at anandtech:
there is no benchmark for the 128gb version or am i missing something
Yeah just noticed they've got the 256GB only :(
awww okay :(
I bought mine last week through Crucial Direct. I used my 28 Degrees mastercard which has no foreign transaction fees so including delivery and the thanks to high $$ at the time of purchase it worked out to AU$252. Had it on my doorstep 2 days later.
I've claimed warranty through crucial directly before for some Ballistix ram that died on me. They were great to deal with and the whole process took under 2 weeks from me sending it to getting it back so I have no qualms about not having "local" warranty on this.
Good review of the M4/Vertex3/Intel/SF1200 drives:
http://translate.google.com.au/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&…
Did you have to pay for shipping or was it covered?
I believe you have to pay to ship it to them, they pay return shipping. Means probably $15-25 to get a warranty claim. So you'd have to get it fixed under warranty 2-3 times before it became cheaper to buy locally if you want to look at it that way.
Well it depends if you have a store near you that stocks the drive…otherwise you'd still have to pay shipping.
What's the failure rates on SSDs? Just wanted to know… because at 128gb, for $265 delivered, these cost nearly 5 times as much as a 500gb 2.5" drive :\
The failure rate is similar to regular drives.
You're paying for the massively improved speed both in MB/s and seek times.
It is quite a premium though, you have to admit =\
you are also paying for reduced heat and practically silent drives
Yes, it isn't for everyone.
But with x4-5 read speeds and x0.1ish seek times, the price is not exactly surprising.
I agree it's a massive premium, but the sheer amount of time saved from having an SSD is, to be a mastercard cliche, priceless.
If your job involves sitting in front of a computer for 5+ hours a day and your effective salary is greater than 20 bucks/hour, I reckon a 128gb SSD would pay for itself within a couple of months.
If you've ever bumped or dropped your laptop, you'll love SSDs! Not all laptops have a drop sensor, and they get suspended when you're walking or there's continuous movement anyway.
No from what I have read on Whirlpool there is a much higher rate of failure with SSDs….
Doesn't make any sense, your basing that off reading "My SSD died" threads? That is hardly a good way of calculating it out. About the only real issue has been from OCZ douching their customers and the returns that were involved with that, otherwise SSDs really do have similar failure rates to HDDs.
As to the purpose of buying one. You'll most likely know if you need one: Working with large files or programs that take forever to load (me), if your an impatient user (me), if you have to have the newest and best (not so much me) or if battery life/weight/durability* are more important than cost (eg. In a laptop).
*Dropping a laptop with a hard drive spinning can quite often cause data corruption and damage to the disk, this doesn't occur in SSDs as they have no moving parts (have a Google for the guys that played baseball with an SSD for example).
I've had an utterly ridiculous amount of mechanical drive failures in the past 2-3 years. For me, SSDs have a much much lower failure rate than mechanical drives.
The failure rates are largely sandforce's problem. The nand is good, the sandforce chip is abysmal. Seriously, read newegg's user reviews. Someone did a tally and it was indicating 25% failure after 6 months. Can't imagine how much higher it is after more time has gone by, and sure it's not accurate, but failure rates are high.
Personally, My SF1200 chip (vertex LE) died last week. Lightly used, kept cool for its life. I was expecting it to happen sooner or later, so I didnt lose anything important.
I also had issues with corruption, not sure if that was the chip or it didn't play well with power saving etc on my laptop (it was always on closing then reopening the lid that it did stupid things like suddenly not being able to find the operating system).
You will need to backup. Do not trust SSDs to be safer.
Personally I was looking forward to intel drives with a capacitor so they could flush their writes if power was lost. Not sure how that works with trim (etc), when the OS is supposed to know whats on the ssd but you lose the OS while the ssd keeps running I can't see how things wouldn't fall out of sync.
Check out the article The Hot/Crazy Solid State Drive Scale from the guy behind stackoverflow.com etc. In a real world usage example, a software developer has used 8 SSD's, only one lasted more than 1 year.
I've had more mechanical hard drives fail over the past 3 years than that - mainly Western Digital. In fact my Seagate ES 750GB just failed last month - and that's an enterprise hard drive.
On the other hand, only one SSD (ocz vertex 1) out of over a dozen that I've deployed has failed in the past 3 years.
YMMV.
Might be worth picking up some RAM for the HP microserver deal at the same time?
http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=Proliant%2…
In a years time I plan to rip out the DVD drive of my Macbook Pro and put in an SSD to boot off. It'll be super dooper, and cheap as then.
But I want to wait til my warranty goes before I do it.
So tempting! First thing I ever do with my laptops is upgrade to a 7200rpm drive because it makes a massive difference. Putting an SSD in will make me cream.
i put in a 7200rpm drive into my lappy. it's meh.
Now SSD, that is a "massive difference"
Was meaning to get an SSD, but didn't know when/what to buy. How do these compare to the OCZ one that goes for $220 on PCCG?
*Edit nvm I think someone already answered that.
Got a Crucial C300 128GB SSD and it works wonders. It was much better valued than its competitors. I wonder how the next-gen goes in terms of performance.
Since when does something being sold for RRP qualify as a bargain?
It's US RRP, which in almost all cases (including this one) makes for a very competitive price. The bargain is in knowing that they offer (reasonably priced) international shipping and sell directly from the distributor which is almost always not the case.
(Wasn't the one who down voted by the way.)
since when does x% off qualify as a bargain?
a bargain is not defined as the price alone. its the price vs product judgement, regardless of rrp or 90% off (e.g. rug sales)
Anyone from perth who wants to share shipping?
lol i sound so cheap. but i got to save on that 25 bucks ! trying to build a pc for under 1.2k here
lol @ fastest SSD on the planet… you seen a vertex 3? higher read/write speeds than this one :)
vertex 3 may be academically faster, but i think crucial is saying in terms of user experience, this is as fast as it gets for that price bracket.
vertex 3 is not practically faster if no one can tell it from a crucial in non-benchmarking applications.
Come on man, it's funny.
I think it's a great buy at a good price, but "The fastest SSD on the planet, unless you measure it and in that case we mean the user experience is very similar to other very fast SSDs so close enough, right?" is funny.
The fastest drive claim is very dodgy. See tomshardware for independent benchmark data http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-ssd-320-crucial-m4…
The Vertex 3 outclasses this SSD in most measures. Have had one on back-order for a few months now. Sigh.
anyone know the best deals for a local sourced SSD? need to be local to save on GST
Thanks OP, you made me buy a whole new computer for this drive to go into :-)
"Thank you for your recent order. We regret that due to increased demand for the product you selected, Crucial m4 SSD 128GB 2.5" SATA 6Gbps, we do not have sufficient inventory to fill your order at this time. Your order is currently on hold, but should ship within 7 to 10 business days."
Awww… but my stuff from PCCG will be here this week! :-(
Does anyone have any idea how fast this would run if it was running on SATA 2?
I got a Corsair Force 60gb SSD for US$145 from ebay (with free shipping) which has a max read speed of 285 and am curious to know how much faster (if at all) this drive would be.
The Tom's Hardware link someone posted earlier includes SATA 3Gbs (SATA2) and SATA 6Gbs (SATA3). It doesn't seem to have any limiting effect.
Which is weird, since 3Gbs is only 375MB/s. Hmm. That can't be right.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1674119&p…
some people have done benchmarks with sata 2
Here's a link to a recent andantech review - http://www.anandtech.com/show/4315/owc-mercury-extreme-pro-6…
It shows the 6Gbps vs 3gbps performance for various drives.
They also show the difference between dealing with compressible vs non-compressible data (sandforce compresses on the fly and therefore will have a range of performance eg documents faster than images).
Whilst these tests include the Crucial M4 256G they don't have the 128G version being discussed. You cannot safely assume the 128G will perform the same way as it's likely to not be able to take advantage of pipelining to the same degree as the 256G (see vertex 120 vs vertex 240).
If your maxing out a 3Gbps disk channel than your pumping a lot of data. A few pages on from these synthetic tests are their pcmark results (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4316/ocz-vertex-3-240gb-review…). This might give you a better feel for the real world difference for a typical user, rather than trying to sort thru all the highs and lows of each synthetic test.
I'm after the same drive and you can get it from OWC for USD$247.94
Drive USD$239.99
Shipping USD$6.95 (USPS First Class Intl Package)
Insurance USD$1.00
Other shipping options are available too and there are discounts if you buy over certain thresholds (USD$5 discount for purchases over USD$249 if paying using Amazon for example)
It says it's listed as 247 . Am I missing something ?
Just a little late. It was $10 off for a few days and now it's only $2 off. I bought mine and the total delivered was USD$246.94.
Still the delivered price is lower at OWC than the Crucial direct price albeit with slower shipping.
WARNING
Doesn't work with 2011 macbook pro, unless you like the volleyball popping up every time you do something
Not really, it's about the same price.
And for 40% more the vertex 3 drives from ocz read and write at 550 MB/s.
fastest? Hah.