[Smoking Hot] Crucial M4 256Gb - $261.99 - FS - Amazon

It is showing up $261.99 for me. Even better. Got to hold off though since I have no use for another SSD. Would love to pickup four of these for RAID0 though :D
 
haha do it man, i have two force 3 gts in raid 0, wish i had gone for two 240s... but raid 0 ssds are just awesome, way overkill, but awesome
 
runnin17 said:
It is showing up $261.99 for me. Even better. Got to hold off though since I have no use for another SSD. Would love to pickup four of these for RAID0 though :D
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Yep, I'm seeing that now. Damn. OP updated with new price and link.
 
Son of a bitch, I thought I got a good deal when they were $309 a few months ago! Why the heck did the prices on the m4's drop through the floor all of a sudden?
 
Oppy said:
Price war is coming and they will be cheaper ;)

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120425PD202.html
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That article's full of nonsense... OCZ has always had amongst the lowest prices, specially last year due to all the Sandforce bad press. I don't really see Intel driving prices down, that'd be really out of character for them. Finally I don't think any SATA transition is spurring anything.

Besides, if anyone was gonna squeeze anyone out of the market it'd be Intel, Crucial/Micron, Samsung, and Toshiba who actually produce the NAND and also make their own controllers (except for Crucial). Not Kingston or OCZ... Typical Digitimes.

Prices are coming down because NANDs getting cheaper, period, the M4 is also a pretty old model at this point. I'm somewhat surprised they've sunkn so low so fast since the end of 2011 tho, given the increased demand (ultrabooks etc) and still high HDD prices. Demand must simply not be very high still.
 
The first sentence of the article reflects what you just said NAND prices are down.

I do believe I should have been far more clear in my response. The rest of the article is well like you said Typical Digitimes :) ie A secret source !, said x and this means y.

But I would still like this war either way :D
 
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btw for those interested in the Crucial via Amazon deal...they charge Cali tax :( ...not sure if they charge tax anywhere else though...use checkout and see the final page for details

and wtf? Tigerdirect selling 256gb for only $229 shipped? What's going on here!?!
 
dukenuke88 said:
btw for those interested in the Crucial via Amazon deal...they charge Cali tax :( ...not sure if they charge tax anywhere else though...use checkout and see the final page for details

and wtf? Tigerdirect selling 256gb for only $229 shipped? What's going on here!?!
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my wallet is suffering, thats whats going on here
 
gigatexal said:
haha do it man, i have two force 3 gts in raid 0, wish i had gone for two 240s... but raid 0 ssds are just awesome, way overkill, but awesome
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Besides the advantages of RAID 0 for SSD's I thought one of the disadvantages was that it can no longer run TRIM? Has this been corrected or is there some idle garbage collection or something?

I've been debating whether or not to go with one 256GB or grab two 128GB and use RAID 0.
 
the337 said:
Besides the advantages of RAID 0 for SSD's I thought one of the disadvantages was that it can no longer run TRIM? Has this been corrected or is there some idle garbage collection or something?

I've been debating whether or not to go with one 256GB or grab two 128GB and use RAID 0.
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For what its worth, I have two M4 256GB in raid. In real world scenarios, I didn't see a noticeable different between that and a single M4.
 
I went ahead and submitted price matches to Amazon, using the TigerDirect links

hopefully we can get Amazon to sell M4's at $119 and $229 for 128gb and 256gb respectively
 
If you're talking RAID 0, you really don't want to RAID any SSD drives except the newer Intel ones or the Corsair Performance Pro series. The reason is that trim is not supported in SSD raid yet (it's a driver issue, not the fault of the SSD). Intel announced last November that they are releasing a new driver fix that will support trim very soon so buying newer Intel drives should be safe since they have a fix right around the corner. Corsair Performance Pro series makes RAID appealing with their excellent garbage collection which cleans up unused blocks while idle. Otherwise, without trim or garbage collection, your drives will perform very fast until they've written exactly as much data as whatever their capacity is. At that point all of the blocks will be full of data and your performance will make a sharp and sudden drop to a fraction of what it used to be (even slower than a single drive that has trim) due to the drive now having to clear out the block before writing to it again.

TL;DR - SSD RAID 0 doesn't work well with all drives!
 
Holy shit these are getting cheap. I wonder if we'll be seeing sub $150 on these M4's by Black Friday.
 
Man.... this is making the deal i got on my A-DATA 256GB SSD (basically a rebranded Crucial C300) for $255 during the week of Cyber-Monday pale in comparison :( I'm glad that the prices are coming down though, $230 for 256GB M4 is amazing! I remember looking at prices for 240GB and 256GB SSDs almost 5 months ago and the cheapest I ever saw the M4 at was around $384 :eek:


I'd say this is the time to seriously consider getting in on an SSD if you've been on the fence. < $1/GB for an M4 is pretty tempting.
 
The tigerdirect deal is seriously hot. And with how great the m4 is, I'm shock at these kind of prices.
 
Wow, I may not build my new computer for a couple months but this is so tempting. I may hold off if prices will go lower and pick one up in june.
 
dukenuke88 said:
I went ahead and submitted price matches to Amazon, using the TigerDirect links

hopefully we can get Amazon to sell M4's at $119 and $229 for 128gb and 256gb respectively
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Good god, if Amazon price matches I'm building my new rig next week.
 
shoot, this is making the "deal" I got on a samsung 830 256GB for ~$289 look like I got scammed!
 
d7a7z7e7d said:
If you're talking RAID 0, you really don't want to RAID any SSD drives except the newer Intel ones or the Corsair Performance Pro series. The reason is that trim is not supported in SSD raid yet (it's a driver issue, not the fault of the SSD). Intel announced last November that they are releasing a new driver fix that will support trim very soon so buying newer Intel drives should be safe since they have a fix right around the corner. Corsair Performance Pro series makes RAID appealing with their excellent garbage collection which cleans up unused blocks while idle. Otherwise, without trim or garbage collection, your drives will perform very fast until they've written exactly as much data as whatever their capacity is. At that point all of the blocks will be full of data and your performance will make a sharp and sudden drop to a fraction of what it used to be (even slower than a single drive that has trim) due to the drive now having to clear out the block before writing to it again.

TL;DR - SSD RAID 0 doesn't work well with all drives!
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Intel's driver would work for all SSD, not just theirs... And all SSD do garbage collection, it's just a matter of how efficient and aggressive they are at it. Some wait for idle time almost exclusively, others try to schedule GC even during use, etc.

I think you're overstating the performance decline without TRIM on a RAID array, it won't necessarily drop like a rock just because you've written as much as the drive's capacity unless it's doing absolutely no GC (I guess that's possible if you write 100GB per session tho).

Over time an array will undeniably suffer some performance loss tho, but you can always break it appart, secure erase them, and restore a backup. Frankly I don't think it's worth the hassle tho unless you really really need super high sequential speeds. RAID won't improve much if at all on a SSD's real strength, small random transfers.

If you want 512GB of space and two 256GB drives are cheaper than a 512GB drive you can always just run them as two discrete drives, nothing wrong with that.
 
Impulse said:
Intel's driver would work for all SSD, not just theirs... And all SSD do garbage collection, it's just a matter of how efficient and aggressive they are at it. Some wait for idle time almost exclusively, others try to schedule GC even during use, etc.

I think you're overstating the performance decline without TRIM on a RAID array, it won't necessarily drop like a rock just because you've written as much as the drive's capacity unless it's doing absolutely no GC (I guess that's possible if you write 100GB per session tho).

Over time an array will undeniably suffer some performance loss tho, but you can always break it appart, secure erase them, and restore a backup. Frankly I don't think it's worth the hassle tho unless you really really need super high sequential speeds. RAID won't improve much if at all on a SSD's real strength, small random transfers.

If you want 512GB of space and two 256GB drives are cheaper than a 512GB drive you can always just run them as two discrete drives, nothing wrong with that.
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The Crucial M4 still uses the Marvell 88SS9174 controller (like the Corsair Performance Pro) so it is much better suited for RAID than SandForce but is still considerably behind the Performance Pro in environments without TRIM (i.e. RAID) as seen here:

screenshot2012042809203.png


http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/marvell-ssd_7.html

Look closely at the difference between the "After 30 Min. Idle" numbers, you'll see that the garbage collection of the Performance Pro is nearly as good as trim.

Also, in regards to the drive taking a sudden performance drop once all blocks are full, take a look at this:

screenshot2012042809200.png


http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/kigston-hyperx-ssd-raid0_4.html#sect0

There is no question, if you're going to RAID SSD's, get the Corsair Performance Pro if you can afford it. Or, wait until Intel releases their RAID TRIM driver fix.
 
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