Crucial M4 CT512M4SSD2 2.5" 512GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) Crucial M4 CT512M4SSD2 2.5" 512GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Pros: Fast, reliable, excellent quality, low power.

Cons: Still expensive but price is coming down

Other Thoughts: I own five of these units as well as three other Crucial M4 256 GB drives. Two of the 512 GB drives are arranged as a RAID 0 array on an Adaptec 6805 controller. These are my Win7 Pro system drive. A second pair runs off the Adaptec 6805 as a RAID 0 dedicated Photoshop cache. Coupled with an i7 3930k on an ASUS P9X79 WS mobo w/64 GB RAM this system chews through the scenery in Photoshop like no other setup I have built. It does composite images from 8, 16, or 32 frames of data from my D800E in seconds instead of minutes or hours.

It also does image separation (RIP) work for my printers w/o popping a sweat - I can setup a 17 " x 84" print job and know it will be available in minutes instead of hours

The Crucial M4/Adaptec 6805 RAID 0 systems give AIDA 64 benchmarks of 1,000 MB/s linear read, 684 MB/s random read and read access of 0.22 ms. Compare this with a RAID5 array on the same 6805 controller consisting of 4 x WD 2 TB Enterprise drives: 328 MB/s linear read and 15 ms access.

All my Crucial M4 units consume less power than a single rotating drive, making cooling a non-issue.

The fifth Crucial M4 - 512 GB is the main drive in my Dell Alienware laptop with a second 256 GB M4 as the cache drive on same. Nice setup and the battery lasts a lot longer than previously with a mechanical drive.

If you can afford 'em, use 'em.

Pros: FAST! Yeah, it's not the latest and greats, but it's much faster than my SSD SATA II Crucial drive from 4 years ago. Great benchmarking numbers.

Cons: None. But, I always want more space. MOAR!

Pros: Fast. Reliable(*well, I've only had it six months). Big (for an SSD). Inexpensive for its capacity. Low power consumption. From a company known for quality. I still have a rust spinner for bulk storage, but am enjoying the performance of SSD.

Cons: Typical SSD issues with random writes. Luckily that's not my workload. Still not big enough for my total requirements, I need a 750Gb SSD to replace my rust spinner. Cost per gigabyte is still significantly higher than spinning rust.

Other Thoughts: SSD is now viable as sole storage for laptops, due to the ever- improving cost vs capacity. It's not quite there yet for desktops and servers, spinning rust still provides terabytes of storage for the same cost that SSD provides gigabytes of storage, but am looking forward to it getting there because not having any overhead for random seeks makes things so much faster overall for typical read-oriented workloads.

Pros: Fast and reliable. I have ordered over 200 of these drives for the company I work for over the last year. I have only seen 2 fail so far. So it's hard for me to believe the other reviews that state they have a high failure rate. I was so impressed with these drives, I bought one for home.

Cons: NONE.

Other Thoughts: I would highly recommend these drives. I was impressed with speed and dependability.

Pros: Faster OS and application loading, relatively large capacity, no issues after 6 months.

Cons: More expensive than a mechanical drive

Other Thoughts: I'm using this drive as my boot and application partitions, with a large mechanical drive as bulk storage.

Pros: -First Time I've ever used an SSD but this thing is FAST
-small
-uses less power
-worked right out of the box
-Easy to find if you use the SDD as the primary boot drive and another Hard drive as storage.

Cons: Not exactly a con but the price was NEARLY HALF of my computer's build budget

Other Thoughts: I ended up mounting the SSD in a Bay my Memeory card had as I couldn't mount it to any mounting Trays I had.

Pros: After taking it out of the box and installing it, had to use EASEUS to format and enable Windows Explorer to "see" the drive. After that it was a piece of cake. Great drive. Very Quick on boot.

Cons: None

Pros: Speeds run at listed specs when running BlackMagic speed test.

Apps open lightning fast. No lag when running multiple virtual machines with VMWare Fusion.

Battery life has improved drastically

It just works and does what it is supposed to.

Cons: Time it takes to restore from Time Machine.

It wiped out all previous versions of Time Machine to support this hard drive instead of the original.

The "Mac Quirks" after you make any changes to the system. Give it a few hours and everything hums just fine.

Other Thoughts: After restore, enabled TRIM, then ran Onyx to clear things up after the restore.

Some users mentioned battery life. I noticed mine would say 5 hours remaining right after a full charge at first. - Let the battery completely drain, then it should go back to normal and list 10 and a half hours of battery life or so.

Pros: It seemed like a good value at the time for a bigger SSD drive.

Cons: Dead after 3 months or so. It was booting one moment and on the next reboot it couldn't be recognized anymore by the BIOS. It wasn't a champion of speed either.

Other Thoughts: Don't try to skimp out on $20-$30 and buy an SSD that is proven to be good like new SSDs from Samsung 840 series and others. I also had great experience with Corsair Force 3 (budget) and Corsair GT series as well as Vertex 4 from OCZ. They are all still alive and well more then a year in.

Pros: Very fast

Cons: Can't depend on it to boot up

Other Thoughts: Purchase 5 of these and have had 2 hard failures and 1 of the drives failed to boot then started booting. Changed out the 2 failures for Intel drives and would never buy Crucial again.