Features and Specifications
Crucial thoughtfully provides both on the same page, here: Crucial M4 mSATA 256GB product page.
Award-winning performance. Tiny form factor.
The Crucial m4 mSATA SSD delivers all of the award-winning performance and reliability of the Crucial m4 SSD – in a drive that’s an eighth of the size. Measuring in at about one-third the size of a standard business card (3cm x 5cm), the Crucial m4 mSATA is designed primarily for ultrathin laptop users who want to dramatically increase their system’s performance. Featuring the same advanced controller technology, Micron custom firmware and high-speed synchronous MLC NAND that have made the Crucial m4 SSD a mainstay on the market, the Crucial m4 mSATA SSD is engineered to deliver the same blazing-fast performance as our award-winning 2.5-inch SSD – in a smaller mSATA form factor.
Ultrathin form factor means flexibility.
Because of its tiny mSATA form factor, the Crucial m4 mSATA SSD can do things that hard drives and other SSDs often can’t. With the Crucial m4 mSATA SSD, save valuable system space by mounting it directly to the mSATA socket on your motherboard – and free up a hard drive bay in the process. Or just keep your existing hard drive and use the Crucial m4 mSATA SSD as a cache to accelerate the system’s performance. Validated for Intel® Smart Response Technology and NVELO Dataplex™ caching software, it’s designed to work as a cache or as a standalone SSD for ultrathin laptops. No matter how you use the Crucial m4 mSATA SSD, experience high-performance storage in a tiny, low-power package.
Consistently fast speeds. No exceptions and no fine print.
There’s a reason that Crucial SSDs have garnered numerous international awards – they do what they’re supposed to do. No matter what kind of files you’re working with on a Crucial SSD, you’ll experience high speeds with no drop in performance.
Unlike other SSDs on the market, Crucial SSDs treat all files the same, regardless of whether they’re compressed or uncompressed. This is important because the files most people use everyday – videos, mp3s, advanced graphics files and zip files – are compressed files and thus unable to be compressed any further. While many SSDs on the market achieve faster speeds by using file compression, many of the most common file types can’t be compressed, resulting in SSDs that often deliver drastically slower speeds than originally advertised. With the advanced technology of a Crucial SSD, however, our advertised speeds are tied to real world use.
Crucial – quality you can depend on.
Crucial is a trusted name when it comes to SSDs, and that’s no coincidence. As a brand of Micron, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of SSDs, Crucial engineers work tirelessly to design, refine, and support a powerful line of SSDs.
| Capacity (Unformatted) | 256GB |
| Memory Type | Micron MLC NAND Flash memory |
| Form Factor | mSATA |
| Interface | SATA 6Gb/s (SATA III) |
| Controller | Marvell with Micron Custom Firmware |
| Sequential Read | 500MB/s |
| Sequential Write | 260MB/s |
| 4KB Random Read | 45,000 IOPS |
| 4KB Random Write | 50,000 IOPS |
| MTBF | 1.2 million hours |
| Endurance | 72TB Total Bytes Written (TBW), equal to 40GB per day for 5 years |
| Compliance | RoHS, CE, FCC, UL, BSMI, C-TICK, KCC RRL, W.E.E.E., TUV, VCCI, IC |
Some pretty impressive specs for a tiny drive. Being SATA3 6Gbps makes it a bit awkward for me to test as both motherboards I have that have a mSATA slot use SATA2. I haven’t seen mSATA3 anywhere but in ultrabooks so far. On the plus side SATA is backwards compatible so the drive will work fine in my system, it’ll just cap out at ~270MB/s as that is the limit for SATA2.
We get lots of IOPS for such a small drive, a MTBF of something over a century, and a TBW spec of 72TB. That’s not bad at all!
Let’s check the drive out, shall we?
