back to article It's GOOD to get RAIN on your upgrade parade: Crucial M550 1TB SSD

Just under a year ago Crucial sent shock waves through the SSD consumer market space with the launch of the M500 series. Not only did the family contain the first near-1TB SSD in this space, in the shape of the flagship M500 960GB drive, but the whole range had been priced at such a competitive level it had rivals scurrying …

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  1. James 51

    £122 (356GB)

    Already emailed corrections but if it's right, that would be some bargin. Even if it's 256, would be hard to beat when I get round to upgrading my rig.

    1. Down not across
      Thumb Up

      Re: £122 (356GB)

      Heh, Wouldn't it just. Pretty obvious typo. Anyway, I got some cheap M500s last year that I used in CentOS test box and can't really fault them. Fast (enough*) and have so far been utterly reliable.

      * Nothing is ever fast enough really I suppose...

  2. Lusty

    Any chance of seeing tests with full size IOs? Modern Windows uses 8KB by default, and you ought to get a bit more throughput by increasing them. Given what you'd need the throughput for (video editing for instance), larger IOs make more sense anyway. I would expect this drive to be able to saturate the SATA connector.

    EDIT - sorry hadn't noticed the ATTO pic. A little disappointing for flash performance to not be able to saturate a SATA link.

  3. Spoonsinger

    re:= "Performance tweaks and power savings – what's not to like?"

    Well the V4 was cheap but wasn't very nice and "reviewers" thought that was "ok". It was just the people who got one who complained - but that's plebs for you.

    (Yes I know that this isn't anything like the V4 tech - or in fact the very good M4, but they did go there, so it's worth bringing up for early adopters to note that they might have problems as there has been a history - and storage is quite important).

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Power savings

    It occurred to me as I have sat listening to my pc's fan screaming for the last 2 hours following a windows update of the .net stuff that seems to initiate a recompile of everything, that we tweak to save a few mW here and there, but how much power gets consumed worldwide when MS update .Net? There are supposedly 1 billion pcs, and if even half of them get updated and each ran the cpu flat out for even an hour, that's an awful lot more than a mW or two on a disk. Yes, I know the disk savings are ongoing, just saying...

    1. Nigel 11

      Re: Power savings

      OTOH for every hard disk that is replaced by an SSD, watts of power spent keeping the platters spinning are replaced by milliwatts of SSD standby power.

      Yes, I know that modern operating systems can spin down the HD when it's not being used, but in quite a few cases there's some pesky app that regularly prods the disk so it doesn't spin down. Also spinning down a hard disk too often rather shortens its life, to the extent that I prefer mine to spin continuously except when I actively shut down or hibernate my PC.

      Anyway, after reading that I'm not sure my PC will have a hard disk for much longer.

      1. Wibble

        Re: Power savings

        > Anyway, after reading that I'm not sure my PC will have a hard disk for much longer.

        I updated my Mac last year with the M500. It was so fast it was like I had a new machine. I love the silence; the reliability, but most of all I love the speed.

        Worth every penny. Can't recommend highly enough.

        Now if they could hurry up and increase the SSD to 2TB as I want to add another couple of Prog Rock tracks to the file system;-)

  5. JEDIDIAH
    Linux

    Disappointing real world results...

    Those "real world" test results are actually rather disappointing. They are not unlike what I see from spinning rust or even between machines on a GigE LAN.

    1. foxyshadis

      Re: Disappointing real world results...

      You're out of your flipping noggin. The 4K numbers are 50-100x what you'd see on the top end consumer platter drives, and sequential read/write at over 3x. I don't think it's fair to compare this to enterprise 15K drives, if that's what you mean. (Where it's only 20x the 4K, what a slouch!)

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @ Nigel 11 You are a real twat. You prefer your hard disk to spin continuously? The heat generated by the motor would kill it faster than anything else.

    1. Down not across

      Really? Hmm, I have tons of drives that are on 24/7 (and don't spin down) and they have been working for years (some well in double digits). And yes that includes consumer drives (actually probably more consumer than enterprise drives). Guess what, not a single drive has cooked, in fact all the ones that are new enogh to have internal temperature sensors seem to indicate them running ~30 degrees C if not lower. Considering that for example WD Blue 3.5" (to pick a random consumer drive) is rated 0-60 degrees operational temperature, I don't think they're anywhere close to cooking either.

      Never realised that running hard disks as intended made anyone a real twat. Must be nice sitting on that high horse Mr AC.

  7. Jan 0 Silver badge

    Where's the RAIN

    This doesn't have a Redundant Array of Independent NICs.

    It's bad enough when people reuse TLAs, RAIN is an FLA!

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