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Crucial m4 512gb SSD now $379.99 on amazon

0r30 said:
That is exactly the same SSD I was looking into prior to this one.
Very undecided..
Click to expand...

The only upside that the M4 had(s) is the extra space, 512 vs 256, and that only costs an extra $150 over the 830 256GB. (then)

So, I decided to go with the reliability over anything else.

I had to trim my media collection down tremendously. Right now my HDD space is only sitting at 130GB (waiting for the SSD to get here on Monday) from the previous 400GB~ I had internally.

I decided to move my torrenting to an external drive - since I only download at home and while it's plugged in anyway. Then, trimmed down my music collection from 120GB's to 45GB's. Lastly, decided to haul around an external drive that holds all the movies I want to watch.

Come to find out my tremendous collection of books, written documents, work related documents, and applications only take up 70GB's of space - the rest comes from music, audio and video files I'm working on.

256GB is plenty of space for anyone.
The biggest use of space is audio and movie files - and those anyone can live with on having externally. (not like I was ever bound to listening to 120GB's of music without having my external drive around)

So, without the 512 vs 256 argument, the Samsung 830 wins hands down.
 
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Prof. said:
I was told SSD's have a limited number of reads and writes. Can someone explain this? It makes me not want to buy an SSD.
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Reads are infinite but writes are finite. Today's MLC NAND is good for 3,000 P/E cycles, which is still plenty for an average user. I could go a lot more in-depth but I think I would just confuse you. Simply put, there is nothing to worry about because an SSD will last several years with normal usage.
 
DO NOT BUY m4 SSD 512GB MF CT512M$SSD2BAA

Sorry, I had to sign up for an account just so I could reply to this.

DO NOT BUY THESE DRIVES. I have emails from Crucial saying that the refurbished SSD drives are much more reliable then the non-refurbished drives. I lost a major client because I configured a workstation with one of these drives and lost 40 hours of billable time.

I got two 512 SSD CT512M4SSD2BAA and both of them died under 20 days of operations. Crucial phone support shifted the blame on to me saying that I was to blame because I did not configure my computer correctly for the SSD drives. After purchasing there is no offical document from Crucial explaining these extra steps before you install the drive. They only tell them to you after your drive fails.

More or less because my computer powers off the hard drive after 30 mins of operation it will cause the drive to fail because it cannot figure out where the cleared up space is on the device.

Both drives I had got physcially hot from use and both would make loud whinning noises when booting the operating system. One was configured in a alienware m11x r3 sandy bridge machine with i7 processor and 16gbs of ram running two VM installs of Sharepoint. The other machine was a i7 machine running a Intel DP55KG board. Both with the latest drivers.

Save yourself the grief and spend the extra money on the intel drives. If I could recoop the billable hours I would of paid triple for the Intel prices on a reliable SSD drive.
 
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I have had an M4 512 inside a 27" iMac Mid 2012 since last August (when the drives were about $775) without any issues. I applied 2 firmware updates since without a problem.

I also installed a M4 512 for a friend in a MBP 2008 model without any issues
 
xpnet said:
Sorry, I had to sign up for an account just so I could reply to this.

DO NOT BUY THESE DRIVES. I have emails from Crucial saying that the refurbished SSD drives are much more reliable then the non-refurbished drives. I lost a major client because I configured a workstation with one of these drives and lost 40 hours of billable time.

I got two 512 SSD CT512M4SSD2BAA and both of them died under 20 days of operations. Crucial phone support shifted the blame on to me saying that I was to blame because I did not configure my computer correctly for the SSD drives. After purchasing there is no offical document from Crucial explaining these extra steps before you install the drive. They only tell them to you after your drive fails.

More or less because my computer powers off the hard drive after 30 mins of operation it will cause the drive to fail because it cannot figure out where the cleared up space is on the device.

Both drives I had got physcially hot from use and both would make loud whinning noises when booting the operating system. One was configured in a alienware m11x r3 sandy bridge machine with i7 processor and 16gbs of ram running two VM installs of Sharepoint. The other machine was a i7 machine running a Intel DP55KG board. Both with the latest drivers.

Save yourself the grief and spend the extra money on the intel drives. If I could recoop the billable hours I would of paid triple for the Intel prices on a reliable SSD drive.
Click to expand...
That's nothing. I lost an entire computer backup because a Seagate hard drive failed within 30 days of purchase.

Thing is, drives can be bricked. Drives can fail. That's why drive makers back these up with multi-year warranties. If you make millions of these drives you're going to have some duds.

Intel drives are not any better. Just several weeks ago Intel found out its 520 series drives cannot do native AES-256bit encryption and it required a hardware fix. Never mind the 8MB issue a few years ago.

It's a matter of luck, and you were on the wrong side of it, that doesn't mean the entire product line is crap because there are hundreds of people who did not run into the same problems you had.
 
Prof. said:
I was told SSD's have a limited number of reads and writes. Can someone explain this? It makes me not want to buy an SSD.
Click to expand...

Just like a hard drive will eventually crash, a SSD eventually will no longer be able to write because all of its cells are worn out. Don't worry, even when it wears out, you can still read the data off of it. In the meantime, enjoy the friggin awesome speeds and performance! I paid $800 for this thing 6 months ago and it was worth every penny! I may just pick up another one of these and use it as an external...
 
I had backups with Acronis which where done nightly, but little did I know Acronis was also replicated the data corruption the drive was producing so it made a fool out of me restoring backups. I had to go back 7 days of backups to find a stable version of the product we where developing and then recode 7 days to 10 days worth of code to miss our deadline. We lost the contract and our relationship with the customer is outside of Crucial warranty for repair and replacement.

BTW, for the person that paid 700+ I paid 620 when it was on sale from New Egg. When the drive failed Crucial made me put a deposit of just under 800 dollars to cross ship another drive. When they cross shipped the drive they mesed up the over night and I got the replacement drive 4 days later. Some lackie also messed up the credit for the deposit so it was held from me for over 30 days.

My experience with the m4 SSD was nothing but a cascade of failures from both hardware and customer service end. While they where also nice I felt like I was dealing with a new company and not a established business.

--

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Oh also, if your SSD is dead on arrival crucial will replace your "NEW" drive with a refurbished drive.

And drive failure on the same drive type ordered 15 days apart on two different system in two different offices.

The only thing the same was the m4 drives and running two VM Machines with constant restores and playing 4 clients of Eve online.
 
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That's a really good deal. I've got the 256GB version sitting here waiting to be installed.
 
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