Crucial C300 or Samsung 470 for T420??

I was wondering if anyone is currently using either of these in their thinkpads? I'm looking to get an SSD on the cheap and was thinking of a small 64gb or 128gb of either of these drives. I know the C300 is SATA III and the 470 is SATA II, they are about the same price, 470 a little cheaper. I'm not really a power user just mostly school work, burning dvds, and browsing. Was a little worried about some of the firmware stories of C300 even though it would be somewhat faster. Any opinions??

 

My C300 is now working very well.

Do check the drive 0 bay height. The C300 is 9.5 mm. One of the 420s is only 7 mm, although that might be the T420s.

Perry

 

It is the 420s, I have the T420 so I'm good on 9.5mm height.

 

One thing that made me not chose the C300 is the power consumption, its very high both idle and reading/writing. Not good for a laptop.

 

I was thinking of that as well, I saw the samsung had very low idle power so that's a plus.

 

C300 is very fast but also has high power consumption. Imo, the only drives to consider at the moment are Intel and Samsung. They have the complete package of power consumption, fast random speeds and most importantly reliability and stability. My Samsung 470 has been excellent in the month I've had it.

 

I have the Samsung 470 64GB in my X120e, and it's working great--I can't tell any difference between it and the X25-M 80GB in my T500.

Overall, what led me to choose the 470 over the C300 64GB and X25-V 40GB drives was the 470's lower power consumption figures and seemingly improved reliability over the C300, which I have seen numerous issues about. Probably the biggest downfall of the 470 is the poor firmware flashing method: to flash to a new firmware, all data on the drive is wiped, and the tool itself is a very clunky DOS-based bootable CD from Samsung. For that reason, I skipped out on flashing firmware on my 470, but it still works great.

 

I was leaning toward the Samsung already so I'll probably go with that, thanks for the input. Now to decide 64 or 128, basically 100 bucks for higher write speed, I don't really need the extra space on the drive.

 

Unlikely you will notice any real difference in the speeds by going w/ the larger drive unless you like to show everyone on the internet how cool you are by your SSD benchmarks.

 

Honestly, the write speed is plenty fast already--it's faster than my X25-M's write speed, and I have noticed no detrimental effects resulting from this in my T500. What really matters is the 4k random read/write, not the sequential read/write speeds, and in that, the two drives are pretty much the same.

With SSDs, given the high $/Gb cost, I would recommend buying only the size you will actually use.

 

Good advice, the 64gb definitely agrees more with my wallet.