Crucial releases budget-minded v4 line of solid state drives

Shawn Knight

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Staff member

If you’ve been wanting to jump on the solid state drive bandwagon but the relative high price compared to spinning media has kept you on the sidelines, Crucial’s newest line of SSDs might be right up your alley. The company recently announced the v4 line as a budget-minded product that offers plenty of speed at a price that won’t break the bank.

The v4 line is aimed at SATA 3Gb/sec systems as a way to enhance start-up times, transfer speeds and storage durability. Drives are available in capacities of 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB with MSRPs set at $49.99, $69.99, $99.99, and $189.99, respectively.

crucial ssds target mainstream users modest performance prices ssd v4 ssd

The 32GB unit features sequential read speeds of 200MB/sec with up to 60MB/sec writes at 1,200 IOPS random writes. As is common with most SSDs, speeds get incrementally faster as you increase capacity. The 64GB unit is good for 230MB/sec reads, 100MB/sec writes and 2,400 IOPS. Doubling the capacity to 128GB nets 230MB/sec reads, 175MB/sec writes and 4,000 IOPS. Last but not least, the 256GB drive is good for 230MB/sec reads, 190MB/sec writes and 4,000 IOPS.

Performance-wise, the units aren’t anything to write home about but the price certainly reflects that. Furthermore, since the drives don’t utilize the SATA 6GB/sec interface, they would be perfect for older systems built before 2011 that might not support faster transfer rates.

Crucial notes that v4 drives are available immediately through select global channel partners or directly through their website.

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Those are some pretty significant drops in read speeds compared to what you can find elsewhere for just as cheap. On Newegg, OCZ's Vertex 3 is <$100 for the 120GB capacity and can hit read speeds of 500MB/s.
 
I agree with treeski... I just bought a Samsung 830 128GB SATA III for $99 from newegg. Prices are down all around on these drives.
 
Way before ever buying one of these drives, you can find better deals on SSDs via websites like dealnews or slickdeals. If not, wait a few days and something will pop up.
 
These drives need to be significantly cheaper than the competition to be a good buy.
It's biggest enemy might be the Crucial M4...

Note; this Crucial V4 is based off the Phison PS3105 controller
 
I'm still waiting until the prices are reasonable for the size of the hard drive.

I'm not paying $50 for 32Gb when I can get 2Tb for $100 on a hard drive that would be a few seconds slower.

Price gauging at it's best.
 
These drives need to be significantly cheaper than the competition to be a good buy.
It's biggest enemy might be the Crucial M4...

Note; this Crucial V4 is based off the Phison PS3105 controller

right on.. I don't think the MSRP of V4 is low enough to justify the performance sacrifice. anyone knows anything about performance will without a doubt most likely go with the M4 as oppose to V4 for a few dollars more.
 
I'm still waiting until the prices are reasonable for the size of the hard drive.

I'm not paying $50 for 32Gb when I can get 2Tb for $100 on a hard drive that would be a few seconds slower.

Price gauging at it's best.

I don't believe that's a fair comparison. especially when you compare the speed in none simple transfers. the fastest spindle drives are still light years slower than the average SSD in real world applications.
 
I'm still waiting until the prices are reasonable for the size of the hard drive.

I'm not paying $50 for 32Gb when I can get 2Tb for $100 on a hard drive that would be a few seconds slower.

Price gauging at it's best.

In some cases, it can be the difference of a few minutes, especially with regard to boot up times. SSDs are best for application performance, not data storage. They are incredibly fast compared to HDDs, but they are more expensive and won't have as long a lifetime.
 
I've seen M4s and similar SATA 3 (6GP/s) drives sell for the same prices as these slower drives. Buy the SATA 6GP/s drive even if you don't have SATA 6GP/s and then you can transfer it (with a big performance boost) when you upgrade your MB.
 
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