• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

For the same price: Vertex 3 Max IOPS or Crucial M4?

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.
kayson

kayson

Member
​
Joined
Jan 5, 2005
Cast your votes ;)

I can get either drive at the same price, so I'll take whichever is faster. It appears that the Vertex 3 wins in numbers, but I hear that the M4 has better random reads which makes it seem faster in day to day usage. I understand the M4 is considered to be more reliable, but it seems that the latest firmware updates have fixed the BSOD issues with the new Sandforce controller, so I'm not concerning myself with that.
 
Since everyone is on the M4 bandwagon... I'll join them. Chances are you will be fine with V3... but M4 is the safer bet.
 
ratbuddy said:
For my money, it'd be the M4 every time. OCZ is just a crappy company.
Click to expand...

I've personally never had any problems with them. I think they absolutely failed when it came to taking care of their customers after the BSOD issues, but that was a controller issue that was seen on lots of drives, not just OCZ's... If their drive is faster, I'll take it.

EarthDog said:
Since everyone is on the M4 bandwagon... I'll join them. Chances are you will be fine with V3... but M4 is the safer bet.
Click to expand...

That's precisely why I posted this. It seems like it's that- a bandwagon. People are just (rightfully) upset with the CS, but then it just turned into a pitch-fork-wielding mob. Even people who didn't own the drives and who had pleasant experiences with OCZ before were turning around saying they'd never buy OCZ again... I just want the fastest drive, brand/company out of the picture.
 
kayson said:
I've personally never had any problems with them. I think they absolutely failed when it came to taking care of their customers after the BSOD issues, but that was a controller issue that was seen on lots of drives, not just OCZ's... If their drive is faster, I'll take it.



That's precisely why I posted this. It seems like it's that- a bandwagon. People are just (rightfully) upset with the CS, but then it just turned into a pitch-fork-wielding mob. Even people who didn't own the drives and who had pleasant experiences with OCZ before were turning around saying they'd never buy OCZ again... I just want the fastest drive, brand/company out of the picture.
Click to expand...

Ain't just the recent ongoing issues with the newer Sandforce stuff. Remember the stealth NAND switch that resulted in the last gen stuff getting slower and smaller? They handled that very poorly as well. Just feel around on their forums and you get the impression they don't want to be bothered dealing with customers who have real problems with their products. To me, that says 'avoid.'
 
Shifting the blame to the controller and shrugging your shoulders and saying there's nothing you can do about it except release firmware after firmware that doesn't fix the problems for months and months, and then not offering any refunds, only rma's, and making people jump through freakin hoops to get their rma completed, leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.

I understand it was the sandforce controller that had the issues I was plagued with. I get it, I really do. But I didn't buy a sandforce controller. I bought a solid state drive. I paid $320 dollars for it. I don't care what controller was in it. It was advertised as the fastest ssd available, I bought it like the week it came out, and it was labeled as being compatible with my machine.

Who's fault is it that the controller THEY picked has all these issues? Shouldn't some in-house QA discover problems like that before they hit thousands of users?

If I pay a contractor to build me a house.. He will find different companies to build the frame, put in sheetrock, put on a roof, etc.. If the roof caves in 2 weeks after the house is built, who's fault is it ? I don't care which roofing company it was or what color their shirts were or how good they smelled or how they had the best intentions or anything. I paid this dude to build me a house and now I'm looking at a caved in roof. It's his fault. Sure he had bad luck and sure I understand his predicament, but it's his fault, and he needs to make it right. Not just tell me "well we can put a big tarp over it and you can just live in it with the tarp on it for a year and put buckets under all the spots that leak and maybe one day we'll find a tarp strong enough to stop the leaks"

Sorry rant over. I needed to get those thoughts out of my brain haha. I hate vertex 3s and I'm soured on every product that will ever come from OCZ from now on

edit - i bought a crucial m4 last week and it's awesome
 
definitely MAX IOPS IMO. From what I've read, the drive either works great and is ridiculously fast, or it will BSOD in the first week....just RMA it if it causes issues and then buy the M4, if doesn't cause issues, its much faster.
 
ajrettke said:
definitely MAX IOPS IMO. From what I've read, the drive either works great and is ridiculously fast, or it will BSOD in the first week....just RMA it if it causes issues and then buy the M4, if doesn't cause issues, its much faster.
Click to expand...

That's kinda what I'm leaning towards at the moment. Especially if I can get the Vertex 3 at the same price.
 
dude, the M4 is the best. M4 performs the same regardless of the compressibility of the data. it is faster in real world usage
 
cw823 said:
I've never seen an undetected reboot and restart. Please explain :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

np bro

constant bsod. Or sometimes instead of a bsod the pc would just turn off and turn back on by itself. And the Vertex3 would be unrecognized by the bios after it turned back on. So it would try to boot and give an error that there was no bootable media installed. Then I would have to completely turn the computer off, turn it back on, and go into bios and manually make it scan the harddrives again to detect the vertex3, then reboot and windows would work fine.

It was a HUGE pain in the ***
Click to expand...

It's a common problem with vertex 3s. You could hit your reset button a million times and the computer won't detect the drive after it does that. You have to actually turn it off. Then turn it back on. Then enter bios. Then rescan the drives. Then reset your boot order. Then you can boot. Its a real nice piece of hardware

edit: sarcasm not undetected like reboot was
 
4k qd1 is the most important metric for desktop usage (normal consumer usage pattern)
there arent many results out there for 4kqd1 with the sandforce drives. the M4 roasts the sandforce at QD1. period. this is with both the incompressible and compressible data.
look to the light green bars below. the M4 is doing 26.1 mb/s compared to 19.1.... the M4 is 27 percent faster with its latency.
You have to understand that 4KQD1 is how you measure the latency of ANY storage device. At the end of the day the M4 has the best latency, and that is why it is faster.
the key to SSDs is NOT bandwidth. it is latency.

yoiu have to understand that anand is only testing with 4kqd3. that is ridiculous.

Also, his test runs there are not very accurate at all. he records a trace of several days, and then plays it back in a few hours. this creates unrealistically high QD that you will never see in a user environment. If you take an average of QD2 recorded from 24 hours,
then play it back in 2 hours, what is your QD during the two hours? unrealistically high.
You have to understand that trace testing can be VERY unrealistic.
Also, these tests were done with the M4 before the 0009 firmware update.
the 0009 transformed the M4 into the beast that it is today. It has been the #1 bestselling SSD @ newegg for months now.

and we arent even touching on the reliability bit.
compressbledata2.png
compressbledata.png
 
Last edited:
Computurd said:
4k qd1 is the most important metric for desktop usage (normal consumer usage pattern)
there arent many results out there for 4kqd1 with the sandforce drives. the M4 roasts the sandforce at QD1. period. this is with both the incompressible and compressible data.
look to the light green bars below. the M4 is doing 26.1 mb/s compared to 19.1.... the M4 is 27 percent faster with its latency.
You have to understand that 4KQD1 is how you measure the latency of ANY storage device. At the end of the day the M4 has the best latency, and that is why it is faster.
the key to SSDs is NOT bandwidth. it is latency.

yoiu have to understand that anand is only testing with 4kqd3. that is ridiculous.

Also, his test runs there are not very accurate at all. he records a trace of several days, and then plays it back in a few hours. this creates unrealistically high QD that you will never see in a user environment. If you take an average of QD2 recorded from 24 hours,
then play it back in 2 hours, what is your QD during the two hours? unrealistically high.
You have to understand that trace testing can be VERY unrealistic.
Also, these tests were done with the M4 before the 0009 firmware update.
the 0009 transformed the M4 into the beast that it is today. It has been the #1 bestselling SSD @ newegg for months now.

and we arent even touching on the reliability bit.
Click to expand...

Are those graphs of the max IOPS edition or the normal one? Notwithstanding, you are correct. The M4 wins in random 4k reads, by about 25%. But that's it. In every other test I've seen, the Vertex 3 wins. Even the specs coming from the companies shows the Vertex 3 being a better performer. Can you post the source for those graphs? I'd be curious to see the rest of the article.

I have a hard time believing that 4k random read is the only important "real-world" performance metric. Yes, the peak bandwidth won't really be reached unless you're doing large file transfers, but 4k randoms at a queue depth of 1 seem artificially shallow.

Edit: Did a quick search for comparisons of the two drives and came up a few interesting reads:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2011/09/08/crucial-m4-vs-vertex-3-new-firmware-face-of/1
http://www.overclock.net/t/1119008/crucial-m4-128gb-vs-vertex-3-max-iops-120gb-benchtesting
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4315/owc-mercury-extreme-pro-6g-ssd-review-120gb/2
Using the latest firmwares for both drives, it seems like while the M4 wins in 4k randoms, the Vertex beats it in everything else.

What I care about most, obviously, is actual, tangible performance, meaning boot times. I found this article which compares the M4 and Vertex 3 (not max iops):
http://www.destructoid.com/review-ocz-vertex-3-vs-crucial-m4-solid-state-drive-213810.phtml'
They're basically neck and neck, meaning no significant difference between the two. This is where I'm assuming 4k performance would show up.
 
Last edited:
May I add that actually the crucial c300 128gb + 256GB has the best random 4k reads qd1-4 of all consumer ssd's, it even beats its newer version m4 on that front. And yeah random 4k read performance is what gives you faster booting times and faster application loading times and is leaps and bounds more important then any other spec for 95% of home desktop users.

If you want the fastest loading boot drive the crucial c300 128GB is the best random 4k reader. They say its slightly faster than the 256GB because of using 4k blocks instead of 8k blocks like the 256gb does.

The NAND on the c300 can handle more writes than the m4 NAND as well so its more durable.

I know this wasn't one of the choices but i believe the c300 is actually a better drive then the m4. It has better random 4k reads and longer write durability.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

M
[120GB] OCZ Vertex 3 vs Corsair ForceGT
Replies
12
Views
2K
TechtonicPC
TechtonicPC
Overclockers.com
FRONTPAGE OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240G SSD Review
Replies
4
Views
3K
hokiealumnus
hokiealumnus
V
Crucial M4 troubleshooting help
Replies
19
Views
3K
Bobnova
Bobnova
B
Crucial M4 or Sandforce?
Replies
5
Views
4K
fornoob
fornoob
B
SOLVED OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS/GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3P
Replies
3
Views
1K
RGone
RGone
Back