Anandtech reviewed Crucial’s new value drive.
Spoiler: Unless you get the drive on sale, pay the few dollars more that it costs to get a Crucial M4, or Samsung 830, or whatever Intel drive is available (I’ve given up on trying to keep track of Intel’s drives; they release drives more often than Oracle releases security patches.)
That said, I like Crucial’s approach to value drives better than OCZ’s. Crucial’s putting high-tier memory and a low-tier controller together; OCZ does the opposite. The memory is what holds your data; you want high-tier memory.
The thing is, building controllers is hard. Intel found that out the hard way; they’ve been absent from the controller market for a couple of years. Based on the performance, I don’t think this controller is doing anything fancy, so it’s not likely to be prone to the early Sandforce issues.
But, given the growing pains with controllers, and given that an expensive controller costs $35 and a cheap controller costs perhaps $20, I’m still nervous about trying out an unknown controller from an unknown maker.
When you do some shopping around, it’s possible to find a drive with good quality memory and a known controller within $10 of the v4’s price at any capacity except 120 GB. So if I were in the market for a drive, I’d go that route, for better performance and peace of mind.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related stories by Dave Farquhar
