Crucial M4 256GB SSD review

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

As well as performing SSD endurance tests. Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a very nice SSD benchmarking application. The SSD benchmark tests many different aspects of SSD performance, including 4K random at different queue depths, and also sequential performance, but more important than this, all using real test data.

Another very nice feature of Anvil’s SSD benchmark is the fact that you can change the compression levels of the test data. The compression levels of the data sets used for the tests can be varied from 0% compression right up to 100% compressed data, and there are even a few data profiles already included, such as database (8%) compression, and also an application profile (46%) compression, which is designed to simulate real application data being read and written to the SSD.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities is still in beta at the moment, but the application is solid enough to use in this article, and I have already verified the obtained results using an SATA analyser.

For this article, time only permitted running the tests on three SSDs, the Crucial M4 256GB SSD the Intel 510 series 120GB and the OCZ Vertex 3, but I will of course test any new SSD review samples that I am able to obtain, and add the test data to the tables.

Since this is new benchmark, I will include the screenshots of both SSDs, but in future reviews I will only include screenshots from the tests obtained on the review drive.

I will be running four different compression profiles, and they are as follows.

• 0 fill (100% compressible data)
• Database profile (8% compressed)
• Application profile (46% compressed)
• 100% (non compressible data)

 So let’s begin the tests.

0 fill

 

Crucial M4 SSD 256GB (0 Fill)

Intel 510 series 120GB (0 fill)

OCZ Vertex 3 240GB (0 fill)

With data that is 100% compressible, we can see that the drive is very close to the OCZ Vertex 3.

Database profile

 

Crucial M4 SSD 256GB (database profile)

Intel 510 series 120GB SSD (database profile)

OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD (database profile)

Again we can see that the Crucial M4 is close to the OCZ Vertex 3, a very impressive result.

Application profile

 

Crucial M4 SSD 256GB (Application profile)

Intel 510 series 120GB SSD (application profile)

OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD (application profile)

In this test we can see that the Crucial is again very close to the OCZ Vertex 3 drive, again the result is very good.

100% incompressible

 

Crucial M4 SSD 256GB (100% incompressible)

Intel 510 series 120GB SSD (100% incompressible)

OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD (100% incompressible)

With data that is 100% incompressible, we see the Crucial M4 being close to the OCZ Vertex 3 and far away from the 128Gb Intel Drive.

Summary

Overall we can see that the Crucial M4 SSD is always close to the OCZ Vertex 3, and we can say that the results that we obtained were very impressive.

 

Now let’s head to the next page for some real world tests….

 

• IOMeter test results
• Real world tests