Crucial v4 (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on November 22, 2012 1:01 PM ESTPerformance Over Time & TRIM
I first ran HD Tach on a secure erased drive to get the baseline:
Next I filled the drive with sequential data and tortured it with compressible 4KB random writes (LBA space 100%, QD=32) for 20 minutes:
The result is rather interesting. Performance does not degrade significantly and after around 30% of the LBAs have been written to, performance is back to where it was after secure erasing.
As 20 minutes wasn't enough, I extended the length of the torture to 60 minutes:
And the graph is almost the same as after 20 minutes of torturing. The v4 seems to be doing active garbage collection, which means it tries to clean some blocks every time a write request comes in. As you can see, performance is getting better and better as the drive receives write requests and it's again back to brand new state after ~75GB of writes.
FInally I TRIMed the drive:
There are a few odd drops but overall write speed is what it should be. The drops are most likely related to internal task scheduling. A sent TRIM command does not mean that the drive will automatically exceute it as the controller may prioritize some other task, which leads to a scenario where all blocks are not cleaned.
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beginner99 - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
or 1 TB version for cheap would be available this would make sense in a laptop. But at these small capacities and the performance, it is just not recommendable. I mean my intel G2 beats it in every aspect except write.Death666Angel - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
Yeah, pretty much my opinion, too. I've been looking to upgrade to a new SSD for a while. The Crucial v4 is sometimes cheaper, but not by much (10-20 € compared to decent SATA 6Gb/s drives), so that it isn't really worth it to me, even if all I have at the moment are SATA 3Gb/s controllers. :)Wolfpup - Thursday, December 13, 2012 - link
Glad I saw this review, I was expecting it to be so different from the M4. Personally I'd just go for an M4. Intel's 320 series is IMO one of the best drives on the market too, but it's just too expensive versus the M4. 520 is Sandforce...kinda bug fixed Sandforce but still....WooDaddy - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
I'm somewhat speechless at how horrible the performance of this SSD is for a NEW product.Kristian, IF you have the time, could you add the Velociraptor to the charts or just do a side-by-side comparison? There has to be some saving grace for this drive. I know you mentioned an order of magnitude better, but considering the rest of the field is 2x - 3x better in virtually every way, maybe it's still worth it over a traditional HDD. Maybe even a comparison against a hybrid drive like the Momentus XT as well.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
600GB VelociRaptor is included in some graphs but not all since we haven't run all tests on the VelociRaptor (e.g. increasing QD doesn't affect performance, so there is no need for a separate QD32 random write test).The best tool for comparison, as always, is our Bench: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/669?vs=182
jordanclock - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
The Bench tool is meant for just that kind of request.beginner99 - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
As you can see that comparison just shows how crappy hdds actually are. Even this POS is easy 10x faster in random write and 100x in random read...hnzw rui - Thursday, December 6, 2012 - link
Theoretical benches, sure. However, on the AnandTech 2010 Storage Bench, the VelociRaptor didn't perform as badly compared to an X25-M as the random 4K performance numbers would imply. I think a couple of mechanical drives (e.g. VelociRaptor and a standard 7200RPM HDD) should be benchmarked using the 2011 AnandTech Storage Bench and added to the bench tool for use as reference.Bubon - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
I am dissapointed. Older m4 is still better than the newer v4.Death666Angel - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
The newer v4 isn't meant as a replacement. That comment is like saying "my GTX 580 is still faster than the newer GT 640, damn!"....