Mainstream SSD Shootout: Crucial v4 vs. OCZ Agility 4 256GB

You can find Crucial M4 256 on amazon for just a tad less than $200 now, that's less than a dollar per GB. I might just pull the trigger soon, more towards this holiday season.
 
My 512GB Vertex 4 (which is even faster than the 256 included in this review) has not given me any problems yet either... but you can bet if it craps out I'll be crying very loudly.
 
I think you missed the most important number: 1.5, as in 1.5 gb/s. I use an HP/Compaq NC4400 laptop at live music/dj/kj gigs. It's small (doesn't distract), powerful enough (2ghz duo) and cheap ($135.00). Drive speed is becoming important because I am starting to use softsynths. I'm stuck with a 1.5 gb/s interface. If I want to go the SSD route I don't have many options and so far the V4 seems to be the best and cheapest.

I suspect the V4 was actually intended for laptops with 1.5 gb/s interfaces and the only reason it has a SATA II interface is because it's a technological non-issue to do both. You can think of it as a "retrofit" design with a really good price. Given that perspective, the comparison with a SATA III drive is informative but misses the point.
 
Why is it that writers do reviews with apples and oranges?

The Crucial M4 is a SATAll drive and the OCZ Agility 4 drive is SATAlll. Why not compare a Corvette ZR1 and a Corvette Z06 and say the Z06 is not as fast?

Do you actually get paid to write stuff like this?
 
Odd logic :eek: . It’s the v4 by the way and it was released around the same time as the Agility 4 for roughly the same price. Both are budget SSDs, the v4 is the budget option to the m4 and the Agility 4 is the budget option to the Vertex 4. Sorry but to me it makes sense to compare them regardless of the SATA spec.

Why not compare a Corvette ZR1 and a Corvette Z06 and say the Z06 is not as fast?

Do I really need to say why? That analogy doesn’t even apply here …. But okay.
 
I just thought I should update this thread with a little info on our experience with the Crucial v4 drive. The drive has an issue that causes the system to pause for a few seconds every now and then. Crucial has not issue a firmware update that solves this and there are quite a large number of v4 users reporting this problem over on the Crucial forums. We have been running the drive in an office PC for about 4 months now and the system pause happens once every few days, so not a lot but it is still annoying.
 
I wish I had read this article back in January when I purchased my Crucial V4. It failed last night in the middle of a backup process. Drive no longer recognized by any of the three computers in the house. It went from working to nothing but a huge frustration literally overnight.

what a piece of trash!
 
I wish I had read this article back in January when I purchased my Crucial V4. It failed last night in the middle of a backup process. Drive no longer recognized by any of the three computers in the house. It went from working to nothing but a huge frustration literally overnight.

what a piece of trash!


Yep a bad product indeed. Just a few months after using it in a system we ran into constant system pauses. Now our sample v4 drive no longer works either, though the data on it wasn't lost. It only copied about 10-20GB at a time before crashing. We binned it about 3 months ago.
 
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