Last Updated on April 3, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
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 has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
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