I jumped on the SSD train early on without 6G controler on my motherboards, so haven't had the pleasure to run on SATAIII / 6GB yet, but future proofing is a good excuse to go 6G.

I bought a Kingston SSDNow 64GB for my laptop in December 2009 and transferred it to my HTPC shortly after. My game system is running a Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB as boot for Win7 64 Pro, since September 2010. Married to that are two 1.5TB WD Black in a RAID0 volume of 2.7TB, split into one 2TB partition and one 750GB one. So far I have some 40GB allocated on C:



Samsung "KIES" is in my user folder, which takes up 6GB, pagefile has grown to 8GB as you can see and hybernate wants 6GB as well. Once I get around to it, KIES will be moved.

On my D drive, I have most of my programmes installed, divided up into:
-Games (Steam etc.)
-Hardware (Drivers)
-Programmes (Internet, Media, Tools)

I seriously doubt the sequential write numbers you posted are from same size SSDs. The comparable 120GB Vertex3 scores 415MB/s and the m4 scores 375MB/s in that benchmark.

As to why I think Crucial's M4 is better than the Agility is from looking at many reviews of the M4 that were done after the updating to Crucial's firmware 0009 and focussing on real world applications. Comparing SSDs has to be done with equal size SSDs, since comparing a 120GB with a 60GB one will always favour the larger one in 99% of the benchmarks.

If I were to focus on write performance, I would let "Incompressible Sequential" write benchmarks decide and go for Corsair P3. Makes sense for people who mainly use iTunes and compressed video files.

Skinflint.co.uk has the 64GB M4 as the lowest price per GB SSD, under 100 quid. The 120GB variants are close together. Finally, one 120GB comparison (Pre-0009) @ HardOCP

Samsung 470 series.

Read/Write speeds are there just to boost sale numbers. In real life use and performance dealing with small 4k files makes all the difference.

Besides, Samsung is on their 5th gen controller while Starforce is on 2nd.

I've got a 300 gb Intel 320. I don't have SATA 3 on my system, so it won in terms of dollar per gigabyte.

We have about 140 or so odd SSDs in machines throughout our lab. Several are SATA II and some are SATA III. For the current crop factoring speed versus reliability and firmware dependability, I would say go with the Crucial M4 with the very latest firmware. OCZ Vertex 2, while not 6G is not bad at all either. The latest OCZ Vertex 3 drives have had several BSOD issues with many motherboards (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, etc..) and we have seen this as well in our lab. The latest firmware has helped but not ended all the issues. Plus Crucial is cheaper and has a better warranty.

Good to know. Is there a visible pattern yet, or is it still evenly divided over the various motherboards?

Here's a recent 120/240GB comparison @ TechReport. It shows the m4 SSDs certainly holding it's own where it counts, but the Corsair Force 3 SSDs (GT and non-GT) display their performance in the benchmarks and have competitive prices (GT) or a good bit cheaper (non-GT). Might have something to do with restoring goodwill after the call--back this summer.

JAMF , could you say what software this is displaying your HD ? Thanks.

DiskSpaceFan, also a handy tool, that I shall add to the "List Of Good Free Programmes" thread.

I quite like the Crucical M4 128GB, but it sometimes hangs a little before delivering next pack of data. Seems more stable than my Patriot Torqx though, no more volume bitmap errors in Checkdisk.

I think the market right now is such that you can't really go wrong with major brand SSDs, Corsair, Crucical, Samsung all have very good offers. When I started two years ago with my first SSD, you still had some rather bad controllers on the market, no longer the case today.

You've chose the worst time to look at this ICE.....HDD prices have just about doubled in the last week due to the problems overseas. It's projected that it will be like this for appoximately the next 6 months.

From my limited 3 weeks of experience so far with a crucial M4 128G:

If your mobo supports Sata2 ,or better still, sata3 you should be OK to go unless there are documented difficulties
with that mboard and Bios and SSD

Loading win7 64 and arma2 basic has taken up about 60G of the 128 G available !!

My prediction then is you may not be able to load as many programmes as you would like
once win 7 is on the 64G ssd because of a lack of space.

The speed difference is noticeable and tho' SSD is not cheap , I'm glad I invested.