Crucial v4 (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on November 22, 2012 1:01 PM ESTFinal Words
Building a low-cost SSD is not easy; we have witnessed that many times now. There are essentially two ways to build one: either you go with a cheap controller or cheap NAND. What Crucial chose was a cheap controller and higher quality NAND. Since Crucial is a subsidiary of Micron, that choice makes sense because their expertise lies in the NAND fabrication, not in the controller technology. NAND actually still has fairly big profits despite the decline in prices, so Crucial/Micron can use good quality NAND in low-end SSDs and still turn a profit. A powerful third party controller would basically make the v4 an m4 and defeat the purpose of a budget SSD.
A good example of the other approach, a powerful controller and cheap NAND, is OCZ's Agility 4. It uses the same Indilinx Everest 2 controller as found in Vertex 4 but is coupled with asynchronous NAND instead of faster but more expensive synchronous NAND. OCZ is a controller company, so that concept was the most sensible for them. You will have to buy NAND from someone anyway and an easy way to cut the expenses is to simply buy cheaper, lower quality NAND.
Both of these ways have something in common: neither of them really works. The Agility 4 isn't really worth the small savings as we found in our review, and neither is Crucial's v4. To be straight, the v4 is slow. I'm okay with it being SATA 3Gbps but in that case, it should at least be one of the faster SATA 3Gbps drives. Intel SSD 320 and first generation SandForce drives are beating it by a factor of three to five in both Storage Suites, which is unacceptable for a new SSD in 2012.
The v4 would have to be significantly cheaper than any other SSD to be worth buying. At the current prices, you can get an SSD that is several times faster for $5-20 more depending on the model and capacity. If you're lucky, you may be able to catch a hot sale and get a good SSD (say Samsung SSD 830 for instance) for less than the v4. Hence I really can't recommend the v4 at all; you're better off waiting a short while for a sale on a better SSD, or just pay slightly more now if you're in a position where waiting is not possible (a drive failure for example).
The only value SSD that really makes sense is Samsung's SSD 840. You really need a good controller and firmware to build a good SSD; if you just use the cheapest possible controller on the market you will end up with a bad SSD. Fast NAND doesn't help if the controller is the bottleneck because it simply cannot feed the NAND with data fast enough, but it's possible to get away with slower NAND if you have a great controller as we saw with the SSD 840. Even the 840 faces stiff competition from existing drives (e.g. Samsung's own 830), though, so until prices drop for TLC drives we suggest looking at the existing SSDs.
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andrejg - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
I thought the same until - I had two PC's of similar capacity with windows 8 side by side. One had Samsung SSD 830 256 and the other had Crucial v4 128.Difference was noticable, from start/boot to installations and other operations. They are both very good comparing to HDD, but Samsung rocks and Crucial is only faster than HDD.
supercoffee - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
I'm no expert, but I thought SSD read performance was generally always higher than write performance. If this is the case, then the average read and write speed charts on the Storage bench 2011 page are wrong and should be fixed. Thanks.Kristian Vättö - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
When you read data, you have to fetch it from the actual NAND. When writing, you can first cache the data and write it to NAND at a later date (works well with small IOs as they can then be combined to increase throughput). Writing to a cache is extremely fast and hence write speeds are often higher.Sequential read speed at bigger IO sizes is definitely higher, but most of the actual usage IOs are somewhat random and small in size. Big sequential IOs are easy to read because you get the benefit of multiple dies but the smaller the IO and queue depth, the less interleaving can be done. For example, 4KB random read at QD1 is often limited by NAND bandwidth because you can only read from one NAND die at the time, which isn't all that fast.
iwod - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
I mean the majority of cost for SSD goes to the NAND, there is no point trying to save a dollar or two and offer such inferior product, Those who are going to spend $100 and buy comparatively expensive HDD replacement would not have cared about the $10 dollars difference if it offer something like 5x less performance.Those who only owns a SATA 1 / 2 Port would have wanted a much faster SSD now for so they could get faster performance if they upgraded their MB.
So in reality this strange line of product is aiming squarely at those who have absolutely no clue about SSD performance or OEMs builders who could simply rip more off from customers.
The only niche i think this fits in are PATA, UATA port, where old computers could immensely benefits from SSD.
kmmatney - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
What this review is sorely lacking is any sort of real-life experience with the drive. Does it still "feel" like an SSD in actual use? Does windows boot up fast? I'd buy a lower performing Crucial SSD over a faster OCZ drive, as long as itis "fast enough".toine_r - Saturday, November 24, 2012 - link
Unfortunately, I bought one (the 128Gb version) before this article has been published (17-11-2012).I strongly suggest buying another "real" SSD, because this one is not fast enough for day to day use, even for replacing a HDD.
I replaced a 5400rpm HDD with it on a netbook running Ubuntu, and the SDD was slower than the HDD for some operations (typically, installing packages and applications took hours on the SSD).
Experience on windows may be better, but its probably safer to buy another one.
Dustin Sklavos - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
I love Crucial's stuff and would easily recommend the m4 personally, but...This has to be one of the worst products we've reviewed all year. I'm kind of in awe of how terrible it really is, the only way you could justify it compared to what else is available is to sell it at half the cost of any other SSD with comparable capacity.
cjs150 - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
Great response Dustin - I only which I had written it.KAlmquist - Saturday, November 24, 2012 - link
With a metal case (instead of plastic) and synchronous NAND (instead of asynchronous) it's like Crucial wasn't even trying to hit a price point where an SSD with the Phison controller would make sense.Impulses - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
As brutal as the review was, it was still too kind! The first budget SSD that one of the major players put out (Intel's X25-V) still manages random read/write performance that's about 3x faster! Granted that drive had abysmal sequential writes (as bad as a bad 5,400 drive), but it'd still make a better OS drive (provided you could live with 40GB!).