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Review: Crucial M4 SSD |
Crucial was kind enough to send me the M4 256GB SSD drive for a review. The Crucial M4 is designed by and manufactured by Micron Technology and it uses the Micron’s 25nm NAND technology, it also has the latest SATA3 controller from Marvell and it’s available in four different sizes, 64GB/128GB/256GB and 512GB. There are many SATA3 solid state drives out there that want a place in our desktop PCs, and in this review I’ll be testing the overall performance of the M4. The manufacturer promises 65,000 IOPS, read speeds up to 415MB/S and write speeds up to 260MB/S on SATA3.
Company Information
I’m sure most MyCE members will be familiar with the Crucial brand name. Crucial has been manufacturing high performance, high quality PC memory, SSDs, and other PC related hardware for many years.
If you would like to find out more about Crucial, you can visit the Crucial website
Packaging
Not much to see on the box of the Crucial M4, the SSD was a review sample so there wasn’t much inside the box, only the drive and the brochure with all the info that a reviewer needs. When you decide to purchase the M4 you won’t be getting the package that you see in the picture. Instead you have various different choices that you can select. Have a look at the next picture to see what M4 SSD packages are available.
Three options are available as we can see. Now it’s time to take a closer look at the Crucial M4 SSD that was send to us.
Rear side of the Crucial M4 SSD.
Front side.
Front of the box.
Inside the Crucial M4
Time to see what is inside the Crucial M4 housing.
Front
Back
On the top of the PCB we can see the Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2 SATA3 controller and eight 25nm NAND’s manufactured by Micron, on the reverse side of the PCB there are eight more 25nm NAND’s and the buffer for the drive.
A close look at the Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2 SATA3 controller. The Marvell controller promises a better performance over the previous controller that was used on the Crucial C300 SSD. Higher IOPS and read/write speed, as well as better TRIM performance.
Micron’s 25nm NAND.
The buffer of the M4 SSD. 128MB
Crucial M4 Specifications
Here are the specifications of the Crucial M4 as they appear on their website.
7 Comments
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Originally Posted by Im a PC
Why didn't you use the 0009 firmware?
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Plus i think that now you can see the difference between the two firmwares, and decide if you want to update to 009.
@alan
I hope that the prices will drop soon, but i would worry more about the price of the LGA2011 i dont think that it's going to be very affordable.
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Originally Posted by vroom
Simple answer, when the 009 firmware was released i had already finished the review, so if i used the 009 firmware i had to redo everything from the start and that takes some time to do all the tests and write the review again.
Plus i think that now you can see the difference between the two firmwares, and decide if you want to update to 009. @alan I hope that the prices will drop soon, but i would worry more about the price of the LGA2011 i dont think that it's going to be very affordable. |
Thanks for the great review. I think the 2700K will take care of all the issues with the Sandforce controllers ( 2281) but I really don't know.
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Originally Posted by alan1476
I dont think the LGA 2011 boards are going to be more expensive than the Asus Rampage 111 Extreme X58 board I have already which is LGA 1366 ( 980X chip). There are also credible reports of a new socket 1155 chip, the 2700K. Stock @ 3.5ghz. My second rig has the LGA 1155 socket, so we will see, maybe I will go with the new extreme 3960X ( replaces the 990X) or just upgrade the 1155 chip to the 2700K.
Thanks for the great review. I think the 2700K will take care of all the issues with the Sandforce controllers ( 2281) but I really don't know. |
At the moment i believe that most users with a good system (AMD or Intel quad core) will benefit more from an SSD.
Very good - comprehensive review.
Thank you for your time and effort.
About this category
Solid State (ssd)
- Relatively new way of storing data in PCs / Laptops. Solid State Drives (SSDs) have no moving parts which means they're completely silent. Another advantage is that the more expensive SSDs offer better performance than traditional hard disk drives. However, the prices for these more advanced drives are still rather high and the storage capacity relatively low, preventing SSDs to go mainstream still.More about this