Windows 7: Show us your SSD performance 2

My ignorance Wolfgang but I thought garbage collection was handled by the firmware and Windows 7 when you turned the system off provided TRIM is enabled. Definitely a question.

Is a manual garbage collection utility useful?

I wonder if the Crucial M4 firmware (0309) could have a problem.

I think it would be difficult for the garbage collection to work when there is no power - or??

Secure erase is probably useful. I never do that because I do not worry too much about R/W timings. For me it is the access time that counts. And that is a steady 0.1ms +/- on all my SSDs.

And yeah, we seem to get some negative vibes regarding the M4. Mine has deteriorated too (in R/W speed). But as I said, that is not something I worry about. It is still plenty fast. Win8 in Virtual Box boots in 8 seconds. If it went any faster, I would get whiplash.

What board Steve? It is the oddist thing, but I saw some really low speeds. I ended up setting the drive to hot-swap in BIOS, then, even though it didn't show up hot swap in Windows, the bench went back up to normal.

Nearly identical to what my brand new samsung was doing... until I realized it was in ide mode.

Until these issues are resolved I am not sure we should be suggesting CRUCIAL M4 is a good choice. SSD in general is a new technology and maybe most users who have a little patience should stick with spinners.

GeneO, It's on my Asrock P67 hooked up to the Intel Sata 3 ports in AHCI mode. I had Windows 8 on it in a sata dock, but noticed it seeming slower. I put it back into the computer and was the same. After a few reboots, it won't even boot now.

Steve , sorry to hear that.

Drives fail, it happens all the time. I've bought mechanicals that have lasted a decade and I've bought mechanicals that lasted a week.
I don't see any reason to expect that ssd's will be any different. I am however, currently only suggesting the upgrade to people I know already have newer motherboard hardware.
We seem to finally be getting to the point where they have straightened out the vast majority of the firmware related problems. So progress is being made.

I have always refrained from telling people with older systems to make the upgrade as problems seem to multiply when that is done.

I'm perfectly happy with my samsung. I was actually happy with it even before I realized it was running in ide mode and fixed it.
It probably won't have an enormously long life as I haven't taken all hte steps I could to ensure it's longevity, but I am still very happy with it.

I'm thinking of RMAing my Crucial M4 128GB. Another person on the Crucial forum had the same problem with very low 4K-64 speeds and nothing they did could fix it. What do you think?

I think it may have been me. Maybe not. LOL. I may go RMA if they will too, though I am hoping they will come out with a new firmware...