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Crucial m4 512GB performance

J

jon08

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 14, 2008
1,893
109
I'll probably be in the market for a 512GB SSD in October/November, and since Crucial m4 seems to be the most reasonably priced of them all, I'm strongly considering buying it (I'd obviously gladly take Samsung 830 over Crucial if it weren't for Samsung's high pricing).

I'm curious about one thing though: will it get slower after, say, months of use? How does it do in managing "garbage collection"?

I currently own an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G (120GB) SSD and I've had it for 8 months now. It doesn't seem to have slowed down a bit, so apparently they did a good job with "garbage collection" thing that's integrated into the drive.

Will Crucial be as good?
 
What exactly is Raid0? I heard it improves the performance, but also puts more wear and tear on the drive? What's the default Raid though?
 
Thanks. It seems that it's mostly for double-drive setups?

What about single SSD? Is it worth setting it to Raid0?
 
you need a minimum of 2 drives for RAID-0. It depends on reading and writing data from both drives simultaneously to double the transfer rates.
 
Ah, ok. Thanks for clarifying that. Then I don't need to worry about it since I'll be using 1 SSD only.
 
For what it's worth, RAID 0 with these Crucial m4s is extremely fast. This is what I'm getting with my setup:

Oodjv.png


GMvBs.png
 
I also have this drive and find it's performance to be outstanding!

I would recommend it to anyone and have found myself thinking that I could never go back to an HD.


-P
 
m4 512 GB is a great drive. It is still just as fast as when I got it in March. It is in my 17" 2010 MBP.

I just got a maxed retina so I may not need my SSD anymore. Problem is I paid $600 for it and a new one now is sub $400 and I am not sure I would part for what a used one would bring in. I may just keep it and use it as an external drive. I may buy a usb 3.0 enclosure for it, I was reading that an SSD in USB 3.0 is extremely fast as external drives go.

I actually chose the m4 over the Samsung because I was able to upgrade the firmware without a PC. I think that any advantage the Samsung has is negated by the fact that the m4 is more mac friendly. I did my research. I was somewhat sad because it seemed like the Samsung was the best reviewed/rated drive, but I have had nothing but a good experience with my m4.

Good luck!
 
If I were you, I'd got the extra mile and install a RAID0 setup as the above posters mention. You can get the OWC Data Doubler or the MCE Optibay, both get the job done, and then instead of getting a 512GB, get two 2 256 drives. This will give you amazing performance. You have to keep in mind that, although drives don't fail that commonly, a setup with 2 drives makes the probability of your setup failing twice as big. Backup to an external drive, but in my opinion the performance gains are worth it.
 
I currently already have a Data Doubler setup (though it's a SSD+HDD setup) and I'm not too happy about it for 2 reasons:

1. I can't update SSD's firmware without having to take the Data Doubler out and installing the Superdrive again, which I find time-consuming and besides, I detest those small screws inside the MBP - I already messed up one of them once and got through quite some trouble to have it removed and replaced with a new one. So I'm definitely not enthused about dealing with it every couple of months or whenever they decide to put out a firmware update.

2. The HDD in the Data Doubler often spins up for no reason. It happens even when I put my MBP to sleep almost every day.

Anyways, I think having a single SSD is still the optimal setup because one won't really notice 100MB/s or so gains in Write speed that Raid0 would bring. And not being able to update SSD firmware easily is pretty much the main reason I'd rather just go with a single SSD and put the Superdrive back to where it belongs.

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LEARN2MAKE said:
m4 512 GB is a great drive. It is still just as fast as when I got it in March. It is in my 17" 2010 MBP.
Click to expand...

That's good to hear. How much have you filled it up by now?
 
Mine was one of the first M4 512s last May, and still working great without TRIM. I have about 450GB used. It's now in its second MBP (and even faster in the latest, which is late 2011, due to SATA 3 support). I'd say the garbage collection works well.
 
jon08 said:
Thanks. It seems that it's mostly for double-drive setups?

What about single SSD? Is it worth setting it to Raid0?
Click to expand...

Hahaha

Question of the day in a Computer forum. No you cannot. If you read the article that fat jez gave you, you'll know why
 
Not sure why you would disable TRIM by running them in RAID-0.

What kind of applications do you need it for?
 
I have a 512 Gb M4 in each of my two MBPs, and previously had a 128 M4 in my Mac Pro.

While I didn't notice any performance degradation in normal use, the actual measurements with Quickbench told different. After two months of use without TRIM the small write speed was down to nearly half the new performance.

This was on the first 512 and the 128. I didn't repeat the test on the second 512 I bought more recently, I just have TRIM enabled all the time.

I have latest firmware on both my 512s. I used to have data doublers, but gave up on them because of the firmware update problem already mentioned. Updating firmware is very easy on Crucial in Macs (provided you have the internal superdrive still).
 
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