Correct. The one line says "Crucial m4 256GB (6Gbps)" and the other is "Crucial m4 256GB"; there are a couple other drives tested on both 6Gbps and 3Gbps (Vertex 3 and Agility 3).
I think there's one consideration that wasn't mentioned, and that's durability. I can't of course speak for this specific model (maybe the more complex internals could impact long-term durability, but most likely not), but for SSDs in general this is a major plus. I've been rather unlucky with HDDs and have lost two of them to physical impact damage. One of the main reasons I bought a SSD for my main laptop was so I don't have to worry about this happening again.
If you're dependent on your laptop for your work and you need a lot of storage space (more than 512GB), the peace of mind of knowing that your whole livelihood's worth of data is safer than if it were on a spinning disc has got to be worth a few bucks.
Still, though, you have to wonder how many of these people couldn't get by for the time being with a 512GB drive (or the 768GB one offered by Apple).
Well, first, if your data is so critical it should be backed up routinely on a very regular schedule. Offsite. Like every night, uploaded to a cloud drive somewhere.
Which would effectively address the need for more than 512GB/768GB of "hands-on" high-speed storage - as everything not needed routinely could be kept on external drive and/or cloud storage.
I'd generally trust a mechanical hard drive more than an SSD for reliability. The ONLY brands I'd trust for SSDs are Micron/Crucial and Intel...no way in heck I'd get a sandforce drive from someone else, and even then they haven't been 100% perfect.
I love the novelty: I think raid0 is a great solution to keep costs low, use the current hardware/NANDs. I also don't mind the performance. But the price? There are already SSDs with costs below $1/GB. For 1TB, the cost of enclosure, assembly, boards ... should be proportionally lower. I think it would be fair in today's market to pay $750~$800 for this SSD, but no more. I am still an SSD-skeptic at these costs: sorry but for me until I can get 1TB for less than $300, this is a no-no. Yes, I can install a mechanical HD for storing large files, but I dual-boot and ~100GB are always gone between Windows and Linux, so 256GB feel too tight and anything larger is still way too expensive.
Note: editing to remove some referrals. Sorry, but if we leave those in we just encourage spammers and run the risk of more people doing this.
RE: Love the novelty, not the price by amdwilliam1985 on Thursday, October 18, 2012 Check out Samsung 830 from amazon, I got the email this morning, man these are lovely prices. I got my Samsung 128GB for more than $150 a while ago.
Not sure how long these prices will last. If I don't already own an SSD in my windows 7 laptop, I'll be grabbing the 256gb for sure. Samsung and Intel has the best quality as far as I know in SSD.
I sort of get it, this thing is kind of affordable but in a year, with next gen Nand available128Gb/16GB), all prices will continue to crash($/gb). And high storage nand in 2.5" form factor is not all that unique. OCZ has had a 1tb drive out since at least may (OCT1-25SAT3-1T), which can be found on newegg or amazon. When you are already spending more than a grand for a drive, might as well grab one that is at least 6 Gbps compatible.
Either drive will depreciate faster than is acceptable for me. I am still waiting for a $130 fire sale on an Vertez 4 256gb though, right now I have a poor mans raid 0 of a 128gb vertex 4 and a 120gb Agility 3, both of which I paid $140 plus for awhile ago. Its just as bad as when I spent $100 for 4gb of DDR3 3yrs ago. Buyers remorse, the cost of adopting tech early.
If this thing is for Audio and Video Professionals, then it's more than likely targeted for Mac users. Mac users are well known for overpaying for their hardware, so the price for this piece of steaming pile is fitting.
You really need to fix your chart making when performance is very low. If the performance number doesn't fit the bar, move it next to it instead of overlapping with the product name. I commented on this years ago but nothing's happened. We don't often see the bars go so low, but sometimes they do.
Our CMS makes the graphs automatically so I can't play with small details like where the actual number is placed. I'll pass a word to Anand and see if there is a way to fix it, because I find that irritating as well.
Actually, there is a way to do this Kristian: check the "outer labels" box at the top-right of the graph. I've fixed the two random write charts and regenerated.
Thanks, hopefully all of you remember to do this when necessary (looks like it requires manual work).
For consistency between different charts, you should either make this the default, or change it so it only places them outside for too small values. Maybe even for all values below 50% of the largest.
I don't buy that they couldn't afford to put a SATA6G connection on there. The price is already through the roof and newer SSD's hit way past the normal limits of SATA3G (some even bump up against the SATA6G limit).
OWC didn't exactly specify why they had to stick with SATA 3Gbps, they only said it was a combination of things including price, thermals and space. I wouldn't be surprised if there simply was no SATA 6Gbps controller as the market for such controllers is fairly small. I know Silicon Image doesn't have one, at least.
I have a Macbook with an HDD + SSD in an optical bay adapter, but I'd sooner duct tape an external drive to the back of the lid that overspend on something like this.
Hell, I'd rather install a pair of WD Blacks and software RAID them.
Audio doesn't need as much sequential I/O as video, though, I guess.
For most users, the "Light Workload" benchmark is probably the best indicator of real life performance, and here it performs close to a Crucial M4 running at 3Gbps. So not completely terrible (will feel much faster than any hard drive) but you really need to be using a 6Gbps controller to be competitive nowadays.
Maybe for big projects and similar things it's pretty dumb for a regular user, but with games about 10GB or so even on a 256GB SSD you can stuff a lot of games on there!
I have an OWC 240GB SSD SATA 3, and it's pretty fast, but at 1TB of space at this price this performance is dismal. I'm saving up for a Samsung 830 (maybe an 840) for the extra space and speed. I only use about 60GB of that 240 for OS X, and the rest for Windows 7. With a 512GB I'd have all kinds of space for my games. Yes, I game on a MacBook and I know it's not the best but it's all I've got right now. Don't kill me in the comments! XD
I've got that SSD and a 1TB HDD taking the optical drive spot in my 2011 MBP and there's no way I'd pay a third of the price of my already very expensive machine for an SSD that slow. Someone will buy it, but I can't wait for an affordable 1TB SSD.
Think as an iSCSI target for VSA or DAS using an older but still relevant HP DL380 G6 or G7. The 3g connection will be fine and overall performance will be much faster than 1tb SATA not to mention much cheaper than 1tb SAS.
I made the graphs before we had the 840, that's why (but then this got pushed back due to the 840/Pro reviews). You can always use Bench to compare any SSD to another
- it's not affordable - it's not remotely efficient - it's quite slow
This seems like a company out of it's depth, producing a product it should have cancelled outright when the numbers became clear (it's no wonder they don't want to talk about them). Note that I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming these numbers weren't what they set out to create; if I'm wrong about that it's perhaps even more damning.
You shouldn't assume, because you don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a fair amount of demand for this in a laptop despite the price, performance or power draw. Some laptops have a pretty good battery life around 7 hours or so that would still have decent battery life with one of these.
OWC is right that this is a good job for video editing on a laptop, and professional use for dailies in the field would be a perfect use for this.
As far as criticism of the performance goes, I remember plenty of guys here talking about how they were going to buy drives a year or two ago that had performance that was much worse for much smaller drives at a higher price per Gb. If you're loading or saving fairly large projects, a doubling of performance is very significant.
Of course, if you never have done any of that, you won't understand it either.
It's 9.5mm like most 2.5" drives are. Usually I don't mention the height unless it's thinner (or thicker) than the usual 9.5mm. Most laptops use 2.5" 9.5mm drives, although some thinner models have started to adopt 7mm drives (especially Ultrabooks and other SSD only laptops).
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36 Comments
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dishayu - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I see 2x Crucial m4 in the charts? Is it the same drive running sata 2 and sata 6gbps?JarredWalton - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Correct. The one line says "Crucial m4 256GB (6Gbps)" and the other is "Crucial m4 256GB"; there are a couple other drives tested on both 6Gbps and 3Gbps (Vertex 3 and Agility 3).jigglywiggly - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
yeah this is junk.just get a 500gb vertex 4
Argyris - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I think there's one consideration that wasn't mentioned, and that's durability. I can't of course speak for this specific model (maybe the more complex internals could impact long-term durability, but most likely not), but for SSDs in general this is a major plus. I've been rather unlucky with HDDs and have lost two of them to physical impact damage. One of the main reasons I bought a SSD for my main laptop was so I don't have to worry about this happening again.If you're dependent on your laptop for your work and you need a lot of storage space (more than 512GB), the peace of mind of knowing that your whole livelihood's worth of data is safer than if it were on a spinning disc has got to be worth a few bucks.
Still, though, you have to wonder how many of these people couldn't get by for the time being with a 512GB drive (or the 768GB one offered by Apple).
Denithor - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Well, first, if your data is so critical it should be backed up routinely on a very regular schedule. Offsite. Like every night, uploaded to a cloud drive somewhere.Which would effectively address the need for more than 512GB/768GB of "hands-on" high-speed storage - as everything not needed routinely could be kept on external drive and/or cloud storage.
Wolfpup - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I'd generally trust a mechanical hard drive more than an SSD for reliability. The ONLY brands I'd trust for SSDs are Micron/Crucial and Intel...no way in heck I'd get a sandforce drive from someone else, and even then they haven't been 100% perfect.ArKritz - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
Great, more Samsung for the rest of us...yankeeDDL - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I love the novelty: I think raid0 is a great solution to keep costs low, use the current hardware/NANDs.I also don't mind the performance. But the price?
There are already SSDs with costs below $1/GB. For 1TB, the cost of enclosure, assembly, boards ... should be proportionally lower. I think it would be fair in today's market to pay $750~$800 for this SSD, but no more.
I am still an SSD-skeptic at these costs: sorry but for me until I can get 1TB for less than $300, this is a no-no. Yes, I can install a mechanical HD for storing large files, but I dual-boot and ~100GB are always gone between Windows and Linux, so 256GB feel too tight and anything larger is still way too expensive.
JarredWalton - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Note: editing to remove some referrals. Sorry, but if we leave those in we just encourage spammers and run the risk of more people doing this.RE: Love the novelty, not the price by amdwilliam1985 on Thursday, October 18, 2012
Check out Samsung 830 from amazon, I got the email this morning, man these are lovely prices. I got my Samsung 128GB for more than $150 a while ago.
samsung 830 128gb = $69.99
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0077CR60Q/
samsung 830 256gb = $154.99
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0077CR66A/
Not sure how long these prices will last.
If I don't already own an SSD in my windows 7 laptop, I'll be grabbing the 256gb for sure. Samsung and Intel has the best quality as far as I know in SSD.
DanNeely - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Samsung is launching the 840 series drives; the 830 sales will probably end when inventory is depleted.cyrusfox - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I sort of get it, this thing is kind of affordable but in a year, with next gen Nand available128Gb/16GB), all prices will continue to crash($/gb). And high storage nand in 2.5" form factor is not all that unique. OCZ has had a 1tb drive out since at least may (OCT1-25SAT3-1T), which can be found on newegg or amazon. When you are already spending more than a grand for a drive, might as well grab one that is at least 6 Gbps compatible.Either drive will depreciate faster than is acceptable for me. I am still waiting for a $130 fire sale on an Vertez 4 256gb though, right now I have a poor mans raid 0 of a 128gb vertex 4 and a 120gb Agility 3, both of which I paid $140 plus for awhile ago. Its just as bad as when I spent $100 for 4gb of DDR3 3yrs ago. Buyers remorse, the cost of adopting tech early.
SpaceRanger - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
If this thing is for Audio and Video Professionals, then it's more than likely targeted for Mac users. Mac users are well known for overpaying for their hardware, so the price for this piece of steaming pile is fitting.ajp_anton - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
You really need to fix your chart making when performance is very low.If the performance number doesn't fit the bar, move it next to it instead of overlapping with the product name.
I commented on this years ago but nothing's happened. We don't often see the bars go so low, but sometimes they do.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Our CMS makes the graphs automatically so I can't play with small details like where the actual number is placed. I'll pass a word to Anand and see if there is a way to fix it, because I find that irritating as well.JarredWalton - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Actually, there is a way to do this Kristian: check the "outer labels" box at the top-right of the graph. I've fixed the two random write charts and regenerated.ajp_anton - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Thanks, hopefully all of you remember to do this when necessary (looks like it requires manual work).For consistency between different charts, you should either make this the default, or change it so it only places them outside for too small values. Maybe even for all values below 50% of the largest.
Juddog - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I don't buy that they couldn't afford to put a SATA6G connection on there. The price is already through the roof and newer SSD's hit way past the normal limits of SATA3G (some even bump up against the SATA6G limit).Kristian Vättö - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
OWC didn't exactly specify why they had to stick with SATA 3Gbps, they only said it was a combination of things including price, thermals and space. I wouldn't be surprised if there simply was no SATA 6Gbps controller as the market for such controllers is fairly small. I know Silicon Image doesn't have one, at least.dave_the_nerd - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I have a Macbook with an HDD + SSD in an optical bay adapter, but I'd sooner duct tape an external drive to the back of the lid that overspend on something like this.Hell, I'd rather install a pair of WD Blacks and software RAID them.
Audio doesn't need as much sequential I/O as video, though, I guess.
Somebody will buy it though.
JonBendtsen - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
What if they used JBOD or linear raid rather than raid0?kmmatney - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
For most users, the "Light Workload" benchmark is probably the best indicator of real life performance, and here it performs close to a Crucial M4 running at 3Gbps. So not completely terrible (will feel much faster than any hard drive) but you really need to be using a 6Gbps controller to be competitive nowadays.ForeverAlone - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Bloody hell, they're fast!To everyone who is moaning about £/GB or SSD storage, you are idiots for even considering using an SSD for storage.
HKZ - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Maybe for big projects and similar things it's pretty dumb for a regular user, but with games about 10GB or so even on a 256GB SSD you can stuff a lot of games on there!HKZ - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I have an OWC 240GB SSD SATA 3, and it's pretty fast, but at 1TB of space at this price this performance is dismal. I'm saving up for a Samsung 830 (maybe an 840) for the extra space and speed. I only use about 60GB of that 240 for OS X, and the rest for Windows 7. With a 512GB I'd have all kinds of space for my games. Yes, I game on a MacBook and I know it's not the best but it's all I've got right now. Don't kill me in the comments! XDI've got that SSD and a 1TB HDD taking the optical drive spot in my 2011 MBP and there's no way I'd pay a third of the price of my already very expensive machine for an SSD that slow. Someone will buy it, but I can't wait for an affordable 1TB SSD.
Lord 666 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Think as an iSCSI target for VSA or DAS using an older but still relevant HP DL380 G6 or G7. The 3g connection will be fine and overall performance will be much faster than 1tb SATA not to mention much cheaper than 1tb SAS.JarredWalton - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
But will it be reliable long-term? That's someone no one really knows without extended testing in just such a scenario.poccsx - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Not a criticism, just curious, why is the Samsung 840 not in the benchmarks?Kristian Vättö - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
I made the graphs before we had the 840, that's why (but then this got pushed back due to the 840/Pro reviews). You can always use Bench to compare any SSD to anotherciparis - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
- it's not affordable- it's not remotely efficient
- it's quite slow
This seems like a company out of it's depth, producing a product it should have cancelled outright when the numbers became clear (it's no wonder they don't want to talk about them). Note that I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming these numbers weren't what they set out to create; if I'm wrong about that it's perhaps even more damning.
melgross - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
You shouldn't assume, because you don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a fair amount of demand for this in a laptop despite the price, performance or power draw. Some laptops have a pretty good battery life around 7 hours or so that would still have decent battery life with one of these.OWC is right that this is a good job for video editing on a laptop, and professional use for dailies in the field would be a perfect use for this.
As far as criticism of the performance goes, I remember plenty of guys here talking about how they were going to buy drives a year or two ago that had performance that was much worse for much smaller drives at a higher price per Gb. If you're loading or saving fairly large projects, a doubling of performance is very significant.
Of course, if you never have done any of that, you won't understand it either.
geoffty - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
"If we go a year back in time, you had to fork off around $1000 for a 512GB SSD"It's "fork out", not "fork off". That just sounds rude. :-)
Donkey2008 - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
SandForce/LSI (Milpitas, CA)OWC (Woodstock, IL)
Micron (Boise, ID)
USA! USA! USA!
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
It's made in the US.adriantrances - Sunday, October 21, 2012 - link
250MB speeds + Sandforce + 1100$ + OWC = GGGood luck selling that.
Luscious - Monday, October 22, 2012 - link
How can you talk 9 pages about a SSD and not mention the z-height? Many notebook/netbook drive caddies won't fit a 9.5mm device.Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
It's 9.5mm like most 2.5" drives are. Usually I don't mention the height unless it's thinner (or thicker) than the usual 9.5mm. Most laptops use 2.5" 9.5mm drives, although some thinner models have started to adopt 7mm drives (especially Ultrabooks and other SSD only laptops).