Crucial 64 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT064M4SSD2 - PC Components | Computer Hardware

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I. Alam (Alexandria, VA USA) –

  

I just got this delivered earlier today morning via Fedex. Package was in a padded envelope, would’ve preferred a box. Was replacing a 2.5″ Toshiba 160GB 5400rpm hard drive in my mid 2009 MacBook Pro 13″ (with 8gb of RAM). My laptop is only compatible with SATA II (3gbit/s transfer) and not SATA III (6gbit/s) – this SSD drive is SATA III, but is backward compatible with SATA II as well. Installation of the SSD drive was pretty simple, had to remove the bottom lid and four t6 torx screws from the HDD itself. Fired up the laptop and started the install of Mac OS X Leopard. I had to format the SSD drive first, so that Mac OSX would be able to recognize the ssd drive. After OSX was installed, i started to test the speediness. Boot up time from hitting the power on button used to be 53 seconds with the Toshiba HDD and now is 14 seconds flat (SSD) till I see my desktop! I’m real satisfied with the drop in time for a cold boot up. I use my laptop mostly for VMWare and Excel spreadsheet work. A virtualized Windows XP machine now takes about 41 seconds to boot with the SSD, while the Toshiba HDD took about 57 seconds. Opening an Excel spreadsheet for the very first time (after boot up) with the SSD takes about 3.5 seconds, it took about 16 seconds with the Toshiba HDD (after boot up as well) – big jump in speed! I listen to Pandora a lot on Firefox and was hoping that Adobe Flash, which is utilized predominantly by the site, would function better, but alas it does not – still causes occasional stuttering. I suppose an SSD can’t alleviate much of that frustration. Firing up Mozilla Firefox 3 is near instantaneous, though it was speedy earlier as well. I did happily notice that when i quit out of Firefox while Pandora is playing, it’s instant – used to take ~2 seconds before (annoyed me back then). I’m not seeing too many ‘rainbow wheels’ so far, but that could be alluded to the clean OSX install – that’s normal for all new operating system installs. Since this drive is only 64gb in size, one should get it if they intend to install only their operating system/mission critical applications on it – large videos/music should be kept on either an external USB drive or a regular platter based HDD. I myself still have about 30gbs left after copying my important documents and (1) virtual machine. Prices for SSD drives are still very expensive @ $2.00/gb, whereas a regular HDD is about $0.11/gb as of today. Only four stars due to the high price! Hope this review helped, please feel free to comment with questions.

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First I popped the drive in a spare SATA port, went into Windows 7 disk management and activated the disk. Then went to crucials site and followed instructions for updating the firmware. Then proceeded to install the OS.

Disconnected all my hard drives except for the ssd.(VERY IMPORTANT OR WINDOWS MIGHT NOT SEE THE DRIVE WHEN YOU GO TO REINSTALL THE OS) Installed win7 x64. Once my pc was back together again, it benched a 7.4 WEI. The ssd benched a 7.7. For some reason my gpu was the weakest link. I am running triple monitors though.

I notice a huge difference in the responsiveness of operating windows. Have not used many programs yet, but I can tell you that opening (most) programs and (ANY) windows application is instant. Open my computer, control panel, computer management, AMD CCC, etc, and it all opens intantly! No more waiting around! Saw huge improvement in itunes opening. It used to take a good 5-10 seconds for itunes to show up after clicking on it. Now it’s about 1 second and BAM!

I will update when I start using my programs more.

pc specs:

GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T 3.2GHz
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
G.SKILL Ripjaws 8GB DDR3 1333
Sapphire Radeon HD 5770
10TB Western Digitals
Corsair 750TX PSU

Optimizing ssd for windows (found in a pdf on Corsair support forum. Search “optimize ssd boot drive”)

Disable Hibernation – powercfg -h off (CMD prompt)
Disable/move pagefile to another physical drive
turn off indexing (windows search in “Services”)
Adjust windows system restore to smallest size or disable if you don’t want it
I also adjust the recycling bin to limit garbage at 500MB

—–UPDATE 9/15/11
Still good. PC is back to normal, everything installed. Ran crystaldiskmark for benchies:

Crucial m4 ssd
read (seq) 514.3 MB/s write 116.2 MB/s

old C drive
west dig 7500 rpm Caviar black 640gig
read 113 write 109

Iomega usb2 500 gig external
read 35 write 34

In case anyone is wondering, here is the bench for the ssd with system restore turned off:
read 515.3 write 115.3

You can see the pics in the product image.

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Using this dive since last 2 months. Came with good out of box speed, faster than the Vertex 2 I replaced. AS SSD benchmark showed over 400 Mbps sequential read. All this out of box. Very stable , no issue at all.

After upgrading the drive to firmware 009, sequential read has gone over 500 Mbps. And the system is noticeably faster. My investment in a SATA III board appears to be paying off.

System Config –
Phenom II X6 1055 (o/c 3.2 GHz air cooled), GeForce GTX 460, 8 GB DDR3, Crucial M4 SSD (Windows 7)+ Intel X25V SSD (Ubuntu 11.10) + WD Green HDD (data.

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