So basically there is no point at looking at current gen SSDs for an OS drive and may as well save some money and get a 320 or C300 as the difference is negligible?
What about for caching?
For an OS / Gaming drive, The OCZ Agility will be just as good as the latest Sata III drives.
Between a Sata III C300 with 365 Mb/s read speeds, and the new Sata drives around 450 Mb/s, you will never notice any difference other than in benchmarks, and in the Guru 3D review, there was a solid cap in loading speed improvements for games that was reached on the Agility drive (7-8s load time for a particular game) that was not bettered by any faster SSD, but the improvement was still huge over a normal HDD (22s on a raptor). The results would be the same with using an SSD as an OS drive, negligible difference between an OCZ agility and a 450 Mb/s Sata III drive because both are bottlenecked by current hardware.
However, with the prices that the Crucial M4 is being released at, it still makes a decent buy over older tech drives, but if all you are looking for an OS drive, the 60 Gb Agility is the best bang for buck.
Gibbo said this when I asked in that thread, and I agree from looking through the review results:
Basically it goes as follows:-
Changing your boot drive from a fast 7200rpm HDD to an average SSD like say an Agility will give your system one huge boost when used as a boot drive, probably the best upgrade you will ever do.
But say upgrading your boot drive from something like say an OCZ Agility to an OCZ Vertex 3 will not give anywhere near as noticable improvement unless your running benchmarks or loading and saving very large files to it.
This is simply because what really makes SSD perform so well is the sub 0.1ms access times and they all do that, even the real slow ones, its only the really old ones that had stuttering issues based on Jmicron controllers that were slow but thankfully we no longer sell those, they are long gone.
The reason I got a C300 was because it was it was going into a Sata III port, and the prices back then between the 64 Gb C300 and similar OCZ drives was tiny. Right now, the 60 Gb Agility drive will be more than fast enough for an OS drive.