Crucial M4 128GB or Samsung 830 256GB

[keeperos]

Seems like a stupid question right?
But bear with me.

I can get the 128GB version of the M4 for £83.00 whereas the 256GB version of the 830 I can get (if I am willing to wait) for £139.99, that's ONLY a 69% over the M4's cost for double the capacity.

Thing is, I'll only be installing (or rather, cloning from my current drive) Windows on this drive, everything else will be on different drives.

Currently, I have Windows on a 50GB partition on one of my drives and I still have 13GB of free space (virtual memory is located on a dedicated 15GB partition at the beginning of a different 1.5TB drive).

So basically, the rest will be just free space to avoid speed and drive deterioration.

With that in mind, are the gains in speed and life expectancy worth the extra £57? (about €70)
Also, is there any speed benefit in moving the virtual memory back on the SSD or will it just kill the drive that much faster?

Thanks!

 

[rolli59]

The Samsung no question!!! Then again if you are just going to use it as an OS drive then even 128GB is overkill. If you use it as a OS program drive the 256GB would be handy.

 

[ubercake]

It's a good deal on the Samsung and I think it's a good idea to keep the OS separate from the other drives so you can easily upgrade it when you want to.

Not sure about the warranties in England, but in the U.S. they are 3-year for both, so that wouldn't be the differentiating factor for me.

Now as far as cost, you won't need more than 128GB for your OS so you can use that savings for some other upgrade. I'd get the M4. The sequential write speed is slower and the random read speed is slower. But you'll still realize the benefit of the faster disk.

If you don't care about cost and can wait, get the 830.

 

[ram1009]

Newegg had the 830 on sale today for under $1 per GB.

 

[booger007]

I have the 256Gb samsung 830 and am extremely leased with it. having the larger size and being able to put some core programs on it was definitely the way to go for me!

 

[RealBeast]

Go with the Samsung, especially if you can get the 256 so cheap. Best to do a clean install rather than clone, but if you do clone check your partition alignment.

Depending on how much memory you have you may want to leave the paging file on a HDD. If you have 8gb or more of memory and don't run a lot of VMs or very memory intensive programs, you will rarely access it and I would leave it on a HDD.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

I normally recommend Samsung, Crucial, and Intel.

They are all good choices. At this point I would recommend purchasing whichever of the three brands has the lowest sale price.

A clean fresh install of Microsoft Windows 7 is preferred.If you have a Windows 7 cd-rom disc, then installation takes about 20 minutes. Software applications install even faster. It is a lot quicker than installing to a hard disk.

Most of the veterans here are reporting Windows will use up about 20GB give or take a few GB's.

I have the Samsung 830 256GB and the 470 256GB ssd's installed in pc's at home. If you purchase one install the Samsung SSD Magician utility and run it. Do the Windows optimization, the ssd optimization, and the recommended 10% increase in overprovisioning. No muss. No fuss. No bother.

 

[keeperos]

I know that, it's more a matter of preferences (as in, the settings).

I am a computer technician by trade and have done this more times than I care to remember, which leads to being bored to death to do it when it comes to my own personal machine

It's more of a matter of putting everything exactly the way it were, last time it took me about 6 or so hours, including downloading everything from scratch and setting all my preferences up again...

 

[RealBeast]

Since the late 70's I've done well over a thousand builds -- no machine is more important than my own. Take the time to do it right, just like you would for a customer. Now, once you get an SSD install and everything like you want it -- image that to another SSD or HDD with Ghost 15, True Image, or your software of choice -- then it will be a good source for cloning periodically to recover your system.

 

[fantastik250]

Samsung is definitely good if its on sale currently. But the crucial M4 256 GB is less expensive overall. Go check out the price difference.

 

[RealBeast]

Bought an M4 256 for $169 from Newegg, coming UPS today. Didn't really need it since all my machines have SSDs, but it was too cheap to resist. Guess I will put it in a notebook and use an old 128gb as a scratch drive on a production machine.

 

[fantastik250]

Oh man that is such an awesome deal Realbeast!

 

[RealBeast]

Oh man that is such an awesome deal Realbeast!

I know, I bought one and then posted the deal here and then thought what am I going to do with another SSD? Who cares -- it's cheap!

 

[fantastik250]

Lol, i would've done the same thing