the only thing about the m4's for me is the slower write speeds. i'm sure they are great drives but surely if you can get faster write speeds then why not. and the sandforce is now 100% sorted so why keep on about it.yes it was a big problem to start with but they are as reliable as the m4's now
Sequential write speed means squat in reality, and most drives can't pull them out on varied data, only on highly compressible data.
The biggest performance bottleneck is 4kb reads, which all the drives you can get are really very close on anyway, which is why benchmark scores are so close and real life performance is so close on drives that claim on certain benchmarks to be a million miles apart.
IE you can have a m4 single drive, with 500mb read, 250mb writes, load windows in 9 seconds, and two m4's in raid, with 1000mb read's and 500mb's writes, and load windows in 8.8seconds, and never, ever notice it.
There is a reason tech sites that get free gear, or so many of them have dropped real world testing, because it shows little to no difference. A benchmark that scores arbitrarily high for minor differences in speed to inflat the difference doesn't make the drives that far apart.
99.9999% of people on this forum would notice a lick of difference between a single M4 and 2 Vertex 3's in raid(vertex 4's seem to suck in raid), and same goes for m4's in raid and a single vertex 3, 4, other marvell based ssd's.
If you've got any up to date SSD, the biggest speed difference you'll get from a new ssd is the fresh install of windows with a clean registry and less garbage running you never use anymore.
No reason not to get them, just don't expect miracles between a drive that claims to "only" have 300mb's reads and one that has 550mb's, they both have 25mb's(ish) random 4kb reads, queue depth testing is a con(for most people), you simply don't get 32, 64 or even 6-7 queue depth usage in normal home use.
I need a little more space for SSD so probably adding another 128gb, or maybe 2, and moving my current 128gb to a dedicated gaming drive or maybe to a laptop. Cheap/reliable is the goal for SSD's now, M4's are the best combination of that at the moment.
Not that the M4 is not a good drive and very dependable but the OCZ, Samsung, Intel etc.. offerings are looking good now.