Hi there, I am currently using a crucial m4 512 GB which has served me well over my laptops. I need a SSD for the desktop. I can't seem to be able to find 512 GB m4 drives now. Maybe it is phased out or something. Is it worth getting the Crucial M500 over a Plextor M5? Provided similar sizes around the 500 GB region. If not, then I'll just get the 960 GB model.
I would get 2x 500GB ssds over the single 960GB as you have some redundancy and if you raid 0 them they will be extremely fast.
Id go for a samsung 840 evo. Best value by far in terms of performance you get. Dont get for the M500, the Plextor M5 Pro and Toshiba drives are both the same controller but much faster due to tosh NAND. Id opt the following in this order.' Plextor m5 Pro (5 year warranty, 3 years on site) Samsing 840 EVO (cheaper but 3 year only warranty) Toshiba, same warranty, similar speeds if not quicker but an ugly drive is no warranty to manufacturer which means all direct with where you purchased it. iss with that is, most places dont care after a year which is no good.
I need more than 500 gb if possible. I see. I don't mind some performance dip for big capacity drive. Is the m500 that bad?
I'm running a 1TB Samsung 840 Evo. Can't fault it so far. Can't say I've seen any obvious benefit but the benchmarks anandtech did suggest it's a decent performer, and the rapid mode actually works if their benchmarks are accurate (and being anandtech they usually are). It can use 25% or 1GB of your system RAM to boost the drive speed. With rapid mode enabled on my drive the Samsung Magician software reports sequential read of 1119MB/s and write of 962 MB/s. It's Samsung's own app so I can't say I'm necessarily convinced but it's certainly fast. They were about half that with rapid mode disabled. I paid £500 for mine at launch, may have dropped a little and it's certainly more than the 960GB Crucial drive... but I've been more than happy with it so far and it's definitely one to consider.
Before giving an exact recommendation, what do you actually want to use that amount of space for exactly? Simply that, even 'if' you're knocking off 25% for OP & leaving 20% of the formatted space free (giving a 614.4GB capacity), it's a hell of a lot of space... Well, whilst you 'might' be wanting to have all of the games in the world installed at one time or have a massive iTunes library or something (though naturally it's far more economical to be storing media files on a HDD - there's no performance penalty for playback), it kind of suggests that you might instead be after, for example, doing some video encoding or installing numerous VMs which 'could' alter the recommendation. Oh, & it'd also be useful to know what SSDs you can actually get hold of within your budget. Well, in particular are the Samsung 840 Evo & Pro models available in Malaysia for a reasonable price? More generally, with the M500, once you get to the 480GB models, this is as fast as they get - there's no real difference between it & the 960GB. The biggest downside to them is that their read speeds are a bit pathetic in comparison to other, more budget orientated, SSDs... ...though 'if' you very regularly wanted to be writing vast amounts in a single go (ie video editing, mass batch converting or some such) then, once you get above ~13-14GB of writes, it will start to outperform the 1TB Samsumg Evo (as the fastest budget drive atm)... ...increasing as the quantity of writes carried out in one single process increases. Then, just to note, the M4 was an okay budget drive for its time - however the 512GB version of this has the reverse issue to the M500 (ie fairly decent reads, but comparatively very slow writes), but is now hugely outclassed by the better, more modern SSDs.
As an alternative to a massive (and expensive) single SSD for your desktop machine, try what I'm running in my current uATX rig (see 2nd line of my sig).
That's naturally why i was querying what the capacity was for... ...though there's no sense in recommending the standard 840 as a budget drive now - whilst it's got its limitations compared to the Pro, the Evo's significantly outclassed it &, at least in the UK, is effectively the same money.
Space on SSD to put in everything: Music, documents, pictures, steam games, software. Everything without needing a second drive.
As noted, it's certainly not the most economical way of doing things - given that there's no speed advantage to playing media files from a SSD... & obviously, with no 2nd drive at all, you've got no backup if something went awry. Still, that's your call. Anyway, given that you're not specifically talking about any tasks that require a regular quantity of significant writes - indeed, most of your capacity usage is quite static - if the comparative pricing is somewhat similar to that in the UK (albeit that i imagine you'll be paying far less than we do, either in Malaysia or heading to Singapore) the fastest budget single SSD option would be the 1TB Samsung 840 Evo... Well, once you've done the initial install, there's nothing that you're stating in your usage that would materially gain from paying more for a pair of 512GB 840 Pros - other than the warranty being 5 years rather than 3. i'm not saying that you *shouldn't* buy the Pros, as they are faster - it's just that the day to day limitations of the Evo, in comparison to them, simply aren't going to effect you based upon what you've written. Naturally you could also look at a pair of 500GB Evos instead - in R0 they'd be quicker for sequential r/ws, & if you've got an ivybridge or haswell (or sandybridge with a modded bios) motherboard then you'll have trim by using up to date intel drivers - though that'd probably be a bit more expensive than a single 1TB one... ...or, if money's tight & if there's another budget SSD that's much cheaper, might be to look at splitting your usage so that, for example, the OS, programs & games are installed on a 500GB Evo, whilst your media files & documents & whatnot are on another, slower SSD. Yeah, it's just difficult for me to price compare for where you live so, again, i'm making the assumption that the %age price differences we have in the UK/EU will be something like similar... Though i also know that the price listed in most stores isn't likely to be what you'd actually be paying on something like this - given that i'd be very surprised if you weren't going to haggle over the price &/or get extras thrown in as part of the deal.
Thanks for that. I am going to put a second HD drive in for backup. This is just for normal operations.
