Which ssd should I get

I like the M4's, and I've bought probably 40 of them, but for $50 less, the pyro is pretty tempting.
 
Crucial M4 is a great drive, that would be my choice of the two, and if you can wait for sales, Samsung 830 has come down to $140 last week, so it could come down again.
 
you do not want the pyro.

as for an upgrade from the m4, look at the corsair performance pro, sandisk extreme, vertex 4, or the plextor m3p pro. those are all better drives than an m4, so whatever costs less may be what you want.
 
why is the m4 better when the pyro has much better read/write MB's
 
the M$ would be better that is has a better garbage collection.

The questions is what OS is this for?
If you are going with an OS that does not support trim (OSX, *nix, XP, ETC.) I would seriously look at the Corsair Performance Pro. The aggressive background garbage collection is pretty amazing.
The Plextor M3 is also mighty nice looking. if you go with the 256GB drives, they are pretty cheap per GB right now.

If this is for Win7/2008r2, the M4 might be better bargan.

take a look at this http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/marvell-ssd_7.html
 
why is the m4 better when the pyro has much better read/write MB's

The pyro is cheating its numbers because it uses async nand. Sad to say, but it is true. The pyro's rated numbers there are for data the is only zeros. random data (aka every single file you have on your computer) will NOT perform at the numbers quoted by the pyro.

these are two drives that use EVERYTHING exactly the same except the nand. the left side is sync nand. the right side is async nand. the difference is huge. the pyro has async nand and will perform like the drive on the right.

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you want a drive with sync nand. the m4 has sync. if you really want a patriot drive, you would purchase the patriot wildfire, which has sync nand and will perform like the left side.
 
you want a drive with sync nand. the m4 has sync. if you really want a patriot drive, you would purchase the patriot wildfire, which has sync nand and will perform like the left side.

Or Toggle, The Pyro SE has 2xnm sync Nand, while the Wildfire has 34nm Toggle Nand. Force 3 and the Pyro are the same (async 2xnm Nand), while the Force GT and Pyro SE both use the same Nand (2xnm sync Nand). Anyway, the chart comparison works....
 
even though the OP has made his choice, for anyone else reading this thread who's trying to decide on an ssd, if you're looking at the 128GB size, m4 all the way baby!

i just picked one up last week and with a fresh install of win7, i'm cruisin'! :)

i happened to get mine when newegg dropped down to $154.99 too, so i only paid about $1.20/GB. can't beat that!
 
One question. . .I have a 970 EXTREME3 motherboard. I will use windows 7.

Am I going to have to have to use TRIM? I'm almost illiterate with this.
 
Always better to use TRIM if your drive and OS support it. It never hurts, and it can certainly help.
 
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To date, can never go wrong with an intel SSD. if critical data is a concern, go for intel. That said, there is a great deal on a 120GB vertex 3 right now at newegg ($109 after rebate and promotion code)
 
if price did not matter, what SSD would you guys recommend? That ^ SanDisk looks pretty good... Is there any better???
 
if price did not matter, what SSD would you guys recommend? That ^ SanDisk looks pretty good... Is there any better???

the sandisk is ridiculously good for its price due to the toggle nand it offers.

if you don't want that though, you can always get a plextor m3 pro, which offers toggle nand as well, just under a different controller.

the main advantage the plextor offers you is access times. sandforce drives do not contain memory ram, so they have to write to nand to start off. plextor and other marvell drives give you ram, so you can start caching your write into ram immediately, and then the ssd takes care of permanently writing it.

honestly though, I would not recommend getting anything besides those two drives for general workstation workload.

now... if price absolutely did not matter, you enter the territory of fusion-io devices. for only $1200 on ebay, you can pickup an 80gb fusion-io io-drive that will offer you 4k queue depth 1 speeds about 2.5x better than any sata ssd.

I saw an ebay the other week offering the 160gb version for $1100(lowest I've ever seen). the cards are NOT bootable so you'll have to use another drive to get into your OS and then do all of your work on the fusion-io card.

that is what you would get if money was truly no object.

if you are really crazy, you hire someone to create you a bootable pci-e card. on it, you place 64gb of ram and a 64gb ssd. on startup, you have the ssd contents copy into ram, and then you purely use the ram for your reads. you do your writes to the ram and the ssd, but all of your reads happen off of the ram.

it can't get faster than that, but you're going to have to find a ridiculous custom solution for that one, and it will definitely run you into the thousands.

so there is your overview of the highest end ssds you can go.
 
if you are really crazy, you hire someone to create you a bootable pci-e card. on it, you place 64gb of ram and a 64gb ssd. on startup, you have the ssd contents copy into ram, and then you purely use the ram for your reads. you do your writes to the ram and the ssd, but all of your reads happen off of the ram.

by the way, if you are some crazy millionaire and you actually do this, make me one too. thanks.
 
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