Crucial V4 CT256V4SSD2 2.5" 256GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSD Only

Pros: I grabbed these SSDs for a cheap price.

Cons: 2 of the 3 Disks are having IO errors and bad blocks.

Pros: No moving parts top break if dropped.

Cons: It's actually slower than the hard drive I bought it to replace.

Other Thoughts: I bought this SSD to speed up my wife's Acer Aspire notebook. While CrystalMark shows I'm getting the full transfer rate of ~220MB/s windows actually boots slower than with the original HD. What CrystalMark also shows is that the random IO performance is 10 times slower than the Intel SSD in my netbook (which has about the same 220MB transfer rate).

Reading reviews, others have benchmarked this SSD as incredibly slow too, usually at the bottom of everyone's charts, although not usually by so much as I observed.

Now I have an unhappy wife and an overpriced paperweight.

Buy *any* other SSD than this, you'll be happy with the choice.

Notes : yes I did a clean install windows, yes windows did have trim enabled and no this isn't my first rodeo.

Pros: Does boot and shut down slightly faster (at first). Doesn't completely lock up or refuse to boot like my Intel drives did. Shockproof (more so than my platter drive was).

Cons: Performance degrades rather quickly, needs to be babysat to bring the performance back up to par with my old 7200 RPM drive. Smaller than my old drive was, with no significant increase in performance.

Other Thoughts: Bought this drive for a 2008 HP laptop running Win7 as I felt it would improve performance from my WD Scorpio Black (7200 RPM).
At first Windows couldn't tell the difference (Windows index was unchanged at 5.9), but it seemed to load a few seconds faster (or was it wishful thinking?)

Within 2 weeks, it took almost a minute to shut down.

I tried reloading the intel storage drivers (vs MSAHCI), and now windows seems slightly happier (WEI went to 7.1) and the drive shuts down faster again.

Other suggestions: Toggling the write caching off then on (with reboots in between) also helps, while disabling LPM did not seem to make much difference and hurt my writes.

My last SSD experience was with Intel drives, so bad (lockups, refusal to boot 3 out of 4 times) that they went back to the store within 1 week (and I'll never buy one again).

This drive is better than that, but I find myself wondering why I bothered. The sales pitch for the V4 (instead of the m4) is that my computer won't go any faster than the drive will, but after living with it for just over a month, I wish I had purchased a faster drive, and I'm really mad that I cannot return this one.

The only advantage over my existing drive is that it's shockproof, while the disadvantage is that I will have to babysit it (leave laptop on for Garbage Collection, etc.) throughout it's limited life.

Don't know that I'll avoid the Crucial drives in the future, but I will sure never purchase the v4 series again.

Pros: cheap

Cons: replaced a drive in my pc, now it takes 10 per click, performance is very bad. mega slow not worth the $. Don't buy this model

Pros: Well it's a little faster than a regular HDD in some areas and it's cheap.

Cons: Random freezes, lags when transferring files, can't multitask very good.

Other Thoughts: I figured any SDD would be better than an HDD. Sure it booted a little faster, but after installing everything, I needed to transfer files from my old pc and that's when I realized how horrible it was. Couldn't do anything while it was transferring, it was pretty slow. I figured it was just because it was newish, but nope still horrible after almost a month. It can barely handle two browsers at the same time while playing music. Looked around online, people said install latest drivers. Did that, still nothing. Went to Crucials website and some other people were having the same problems. I've heard the m4 by Crucial is pretty good, but I'm just gonna go with a different brand since this is so bad and I don't wanna risk another bad SSD from Crucial.

Pros: Quiet, straightforward install.

Cons: Within a month the drive gets a large number of IO errors and bad blocks. Windows would fail to start (corrupt files, registry, etc.), and documents can't be copied (windows reports the files as having an IO error), so it's hard to recover even core documents.

3 Re-installs later, and no changes.

Pros: none

Cons: used this drive to replace 128GB OCZ SSD drive...this V4 was SLOW. Windows would take over 5 minutes to load...took over 30 minutes to install Peachtree...would time out doing Windows Update. Tried this drive in a different computer, same results...put 128GB drive back in, everything went super fast as it should. I am sure this drive is simply defective, and this is not indicitive of these models in general, but this one is a bust for me. Going back to NewEgg RMA...will try one other before I give up on it and switch back to OCZ

Pros: Great price (although I purchased 2 of them for 169.99 over a month ago...now at 159.99...but thats the whay the cookie crumbles) and great performance for anyone looking to upgrade early or late 2008 Macbook Pro's for more pep...wow what a diffference. Now I can hold out a bit more before spending 3K on a new Ret Disp MBP...lol. I upgraded my 17 inch MBP with 2 of these...swapped out the superdrive for an hdd caddy for a total of 512gb internal space). I highly recommend and at this price & performance you can't go wrong.

Cons: None. Wish the price would drop faster so I can upgrade another earlier Macbook I have. But patience is a virtue unless they all sell out!

Other Thoughts: Keep in mind that this is a great SSD for SATA II machines therefore the lower price which makes it the right choice for earlier manufactured computers particularly LAPTOPS. To Crucial's credit I must mention this is the largest SSD I've seen for its specs, hands on performance and price. Thanks to New Egg and Crucial. Oh and did I mention my laptop is much cooler & quiet now? Lots of positive changes when switching to the correct SSD.

Pros: Cheap price.

Cons: Horrible performance. Not sure what's up with these drives, but we purchased half a dozen for use with systems using Intel DH61CR boards. All performed horribly. Windows performance indexed them at 5.9. Other benchmarks rated them higher, but they were slower booting, shutting down, and in general seat of the pants use when put head to head against an exact system running a WD Blue 500GB hard disk. Not good.

All went back to NewEgg and we purchased M4 drives instead, which we've always had great luck with (except for some known firmware issues). Systems are now once again blazing fast.

Other Thoughts: Not sure if this is a compatibility issue or what, but we saw similar posts on Crucial's forums and Crucial tech support could offer no suggestions.

I know these are less expensive and should be lower performing than the M4 series, but the overall performance we saw we just not acceptable.

I'd personally recommend staying away from these drives.

Pros: Very easy to install and performance has been very, very impressive. Windows score was 5.9 with older drives now its 7.8 with these drives installed. Setup two of these drives into my as RAID 0. Boot time of the system decreased dramtically and with no moving parts my system is almost completely silent now.

Cons: None so far.

Other Thoughts: Great upgrade for a slightly older system!