Crucial M500 vs Samsung 840 EVO

I second Clinton's proposal, for another reason: the optical drive slot is not sata compatible.

So if you want an SSD put it in the HD bay.

Hello there , glad to see so many useful points in the pages i've read!

Has anyone managed to get a reading on the power consumtion of the m500 in real life situations , while using it on a MBP.

The reason for my question is that would like to get one as well for my mid 2012 i7 2.3ghz , 8gb ram non retina MBP.

From what i've seen around the m500 is quite power hungry compared with other ssds.

Do you think it would do worst in terms of power consumtion compared to the 5400 hitachi hdd that comes as standard ?

Thanks for your help !

The SSD power consumption is irrelevant compared to a spinning disk. So it does not matter if there is a small difference between the different brands and models SSD. That is also the reason why all these manufacturers in their marketing point to the fact that is by a long shot not as warm as a HDD, this is equivalent to much lower power consumption.

So to your last question: the SSD uses a lot less power than the (Hitachi), or any other) HDD.

Lex

Hi, I was hoping to get back onto topic. I have an early 2011 macbook pro (quad core 2.2ghz 8gb ram w/snow leopard). I have been doing a lot of research on this topic and am still torn between the two drives at hand. Almost everyone on this post has said that the crucial is better than the evo 840, but I still cannot decide because every youtube video I see shows the samsung drive outperforming the cruical drive in every aspect. There has even been a website I found that showed the longevity of the samsung drive and it was at almost 250 TB read and write without any flaws up to that point. Crucial only recommends up to the 72TB mark and I'm pretty sure that is a gross underestimate of where it can go as far as longevity so this is why the topic is kind of tricky to get real accuracy in which is the better choice to go with.

The bottom line I am looking at is the m500 is cheaper in price (found it for $425 (after shipping) on ebay), but the evo 840 is better in read/write speeds (use youtube to get the real read/write speeds people are getting in similar macbook pros). I don't really download a lot on my mac other than web surfing so I'm thinking that the samsung should probably be a little bit better (even though the lowest price I can find is $484 (after shipping)). I still do appreciate all of the off topic additions that people have but can you please help me decide by giving reasons and real world experience as to why you recommend either one? I am really interested if anyone has tried both drives and prefers one over the other and why.. Thanks guys, I look forward to your responses!

thenatmann,

I myself was torn between the 1 terabyte EVO and the 960GB M500. The EVO seemed to beat all of the speed tests when tasked against the M500 but I noticed that those speeds were on Windows machines and were using some sort of technology (can't recall offhand) available only for Windows.

I finally read a long, technical 'shoot-out' article between the two and it, narrowly, recommended the M500 -> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crucial-m500-1tb-ssd,3551.html - and that's what I purchased. I've had no problems and expect no problems.

Maybe my purchase was just a 'gut feeling,' since I have another Crucial m4, but I've been happy with it.

It just works.

Clinton

Look in the first 2-3 pages of this thread and you will find a lot of information to consider when deciding between the Samsung and the Crucial SSD.

already read this whole post plus more but it has many opinions and not a lot of actual facts. I keep reading stuff like the samsung isn't very good and the crucial is soooo good but not that much about how someone tried both and one outpreformed the other in the same macbook. I bought the samsung drive and If i get any issues with it, I will post back about it.

I have both. and even more than one of each of them.

Hey LexSchellings, what kind of read/write speeds are you getting with each drive? Also, did you have any compatability issues with either of them (If so, what kind of mac/OSX do you have)? One more question: are they both the approx. 1TB versions? I just got the samsung 1TB in yesterday and installed it this morning. I didn't have any compatability issues and just used time machine to basically clone my other drive (took 9 hours). I'm sure that almost all ssd drives blow any hdd out of the water, but I am so impressed with it. I just found the first read/write test online that I could find called Parkdale and I am getting an average of about 500mb/s read and 480 mb/s write. I saw a new macbook pro on youtube get almost 1000 mb/s for each of the rea/write speeds with the samsung ssd.

Great. Ofcourse you are happy.

I have Evo 830 and 840, Crucial C300 and M500, built in in a number of Macbookpros 2008-2012. All are 256GB although I tested the M500-980GB and C300 500GB, they are with friends. A number of years ago I also have experience with Mercure and Intel. With none I had real compatibility issues, although with the older ones I did not succeed in doing a firmware upgrade without a windows PC. With all Samsungs I have the same still.

There is a new firmware update for the EVO840 I believe right now.

Of course the 830 and C300 are slower than the 840 and M500, but they all are comparable in speed.

The speed is not so important : 470-500MB read and 390-410MB write for the later models. More than fast enough to notice any difference between them.

There is a speedtester in the Appstore: Blackmagic Disk Speedtest (free). The read part is not even fast enough!

Some practical remarks: the lifetime of the SSD is rather dependant on the number of writes, so you better have no caches or fast changing files on it, and also do not use the DiskSpeed tester too often! Do never use defragmenters (also not on HDD in Mac, and also not with SSD in PC).

For the newer Crucial and Evo I could not really measure the differences without Trim and with Trim, In case of the M500 I am absolutely convinced that the on Disk Garbage Collection works very good and Trim is not necessary, on the Evo 840 also, but I must say that I have the SSD's never above max 50% filled. It may be different when there is almost no free space left and there are a lot of writes.

Hi, after reading a lot on the internet, asking questions here... I've decided to go with the Crucial M500 240 GB for creating my own Fusion Drive, follow all the instructions to create fusion drive while keeping the Apple_Boot Recovery Partition... The OS installed OK, but I think there is something wrong cause it's taking over 5 minutes to boot, and when I hold the Option key at startup, the Recovery Partiton is no longer available... I'm thinking about re-installing the OS but I think the problem is with the partitions, what do you guys think?

Write speeds are at 240-250MBs and read at over 400MBs

Ico_ss,

You may want to Google to find some discussion groups about building and maintaining a home-brew fusion drive. There has been some discussion here on the subject, but not a lot. I've never attempted it (having upgraded to a M500 960GB I don't really feel that I need a fusion drive, so I've never personally pursued any discussion groups devoted to the subject).

Try Googling - that's the best advice that I can offer - I know that there are groups out there with fusion drives as the main topic.

Good luck,

Clinton

ico:

Clinton said "I don't really feel that I need a fusion drive"....

He is a very polite guy, so I will tell you how I interpret his remark: don't be stupid and do not go for the fusion drive thing; which is exactly what I will repeat now: don't be stupid and do not go for the fusion drive thing.

It was an elegant thing for a very small SSD with a large HDD in theory. It is not very clever because you have now cheap large SSD's. The fusion drive os is writing constantly the less used data and files to the hdd and the frequently used items to the ssd: a good idea perhaps but a claim on the lifetime of the ssd, because there many more writes on it than necessary. When there is a problem with the OS it is practically impossible to solve, because there is no consistent address of the files. Making backups and so is not elegant anymore too. IMHO it it a transition system only in the period that SSD's were very expensive. Just use SSD and HDD normally, when there is not enough space on the SSD, move some large user data files like movie-, music-, photo- libraries out to the hdd.

Lex

Ok guys thanks for both responses...

Clinton, off course I've googled around... But the problem with googling is that you get so many "options" nowadays that you don't really know what to go for... Even simple questions like: "Which is better for a mac, the M500 or the 840 EVO?" you got tons of people that tell you to go one way or the other.

I choose to ask here, because maybe it had happened to someone here already... But anyways I appreciate the advice and I'll tell you guys what I've done:

Well, basically I've done the whole process again, killed the Fusion logic partitions, splited the drives into two separated drives and formated them. After that, I decided to give it another try, but this time around I didn't try to keep the recovery partition, since I was going to install the OS from an external drive (used createinstallmedia).

So I created the Fusion Logic partition again and installed Mavericks on it, it worked like a charm the second time... It's booting in under 20 secs every time, the write speeds got a little better too, clocking in at 350MB/s and the read speeds are just under 500 MB/s now.

Lex, as for your advice... I really didn't know that, all that I read about Fusion has been good... I'll keep that in mind since I don't really need the OS managing my "frequently used files". Maybe next weekend I'll try it 🙂.

Thank you both!

A last word: both Clinton and I have researched and tested a lot of SSD's, and especially the Evo and M500: you have chosen well.

I have used Fusion for a short period and it was not as perfect as a 'normal' OS. It became worse with the day. But that was with the Momentus XT disk, which has only a small ssd part in it. Then came a lot of issues here in the forum, it took me a while to find out. Now I think this whole thing is gradually fading out.

Lex