Just gonna make a quick review before going to bed.
I bought the M4 recently. It's my first SSD, I was pretty excited about it and wondered if it was gonna be worth the money.
As can be seen here, I also got a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter because SSD's are small. 
It's an Akasa adapter (also available on Newegg but under Rosewill instead) which is made in a single piece of aluminum and has mounting for 2 SSD's. The bottom has a thermal pad of some kind which is rather pointless for an SSD, but might make sense if you had 2x 2.5" HDD's in there.
This is the actual SSD, nice clean look, BUT:
Yes, it's already been mounted in the adapter. Yes, it's upside down. Why Crucial decided to do this puzzles me greatly. I checked the internet and OCZ and Intel don't do this. The mounting holes aren't centered, so it can't mounted right way up. The "bottom" mounting holes for are also on the wrong side. I dun git it.
Anyway, AS SSD. It's a popular benchmark and there's a stickied thread in the SSD forum with results for all kinds of SSD's. The result varies greatly, just a moment ago I scored 599 and 5 minutes later I got 537. Anyway, this is one of my earliest runs and seems to be the typical result.
Old speed:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images...vngivetsl.png/
Updated speeds with 0009 firmware:
Now, for all of you who don't know what this means, I also made this recently:
As it says, I'm opening 3x IE, 3x Chrome, 3 folders and one text document containing the whole Wiki article on Isaac Newton.
It took me 40 seconds from Windows started loading 'til the SSD had opened everything. And that's on a month old installation with Steam, Xfire, Messenger, all that normal stuff opening in the background.
Now, since it's only a 64 GB drive, you can't expect to have all your multimedia and games on it, but Windows + programs + some Users folders take up only 30 GB for me. I moved music, videos, downloads and documents to an HDD and I still have room for 2 or 3 games on my SSD.
And to end this, fun fact: When you crash Windows while the SSD is writing or something, everything is just reverted. It's really weird, I crashed because I was testing a new OC and upon rebooting, files that I'd deleted were back. Literally back on my desktop despite having just emptied the recycle bin. I don't know how the internals of SSD's work, but they behave very differently from HDD's when something goes wrong.
Conclusion
I like the drive, but I'll be honest and say that I don't notice it a lot. I'm mining by night, so I rarely have to boot, but when I put games on it, it really speeds up load times (Crysis is a lovely test of this). Libre Office and all other heavy programs start in the blink of an eye. I like it and I don't regret spending the money. Specs say that it can write 20 GB per day for 5 years, so I don't worry too much about it's life and if you worry about that, I'd encourage you to stay on HDD. If you're constantly thinking about your SSD's endurance, you aren't enjoying it's speed.
Pros
Fast
Fast
Actually has a long lifetime
Cheap (compared to other SSD's)
Doesn't have the problems that OCZ and Corsair are experiencing on their Sandforce drives
Did I mention that it's fast?
Cons
Small
Expensive (compared to HDD's)
Doesn't outlast HDD's
It's new tech so there are still some problems
Some SSD's like the OCZ Vertex 3 own this (but they have Sandforce related problems that the M4 doesn't)
I give it an 9/10 because it's a lovely drive for a low price (the cheapest non-Kingston 64 GB SSD I could get) and it performs like the big boys at more than 150% it's price, but it isn't big, so don't expect it to be an HDD replacement. If you need to replace your HDD, get a 128 or 256 GB SSD. But for now, it's a nice boot drive which will impress your friends when you're booting in 1/3 of the time it takes for them.
UPDATE 1 August:
For anyone interested, my M4 has now been on for 1083 hours since purchase, contains 40 GB data and still gets the same result in AS-SSD. Health is 100% according to CrystalDiskInfo. Following the method described here, I've determined that I've written at least 1152 GB to NAND.
Assuming I've had the SSD for 2 months (I ordered it 28 May), I've written 19,2 GB/day. Crucial says in the tech specs that the SSD will last 5 years at 20 GB written/day, so I'd say I'm safe for now.
Edited by B!0HaZard - 10/15/11 at 8:22am
Still a budget build
(17 items) |
Notebook - Acer 4820TG
(13 items) |
| CPU | Motherboard | Graphics | RAM |
|---|---|---|---|
| i5-450M | Acer ZQ1B | Mobility Radeon HD 5650 | 4 GB DDR3 |
| Hard Drive | Optical Drive | OS | Monitor |
| Crucial M4 | Standard Acer DVD | Windows 7 Home Premium | 14" - 1366x768 |
| Mouse | Mouse Pad | ||
| Logitech G500 | Steelseries QCK | ||
| View all | |||
|
Still a budget build
(17 items) |
Notebook - Acer 4820TG
(13 items) |
| CPU | Motherboard | Graphics | RAM |
|---|---|---|---|
| i5-450M | Acer ZQ1B | Mobility Radeon HD 5650 | 4 GB DDR3 |
| Hard Drive | Optical Drive | OS | Monitor |
| Crucial M4 | Standard Acer DVD | Windows 7 Home Premium | 14" - 1366x768 |
| Mouse | Mouse Pad | ||
| Logitech G500 | Steelseries QCK | ||
| View all | |||
Oh well, you already have the SSD, I guess.
