Crucial M4 mSATA 256GB SSD Review

Testing and Results

As usual with SSDs I will first test the performance empty and then install Windows 7 Ultimate 64Bit on the drive and run the same tests. In both cases the test system is as follows:

We’ll be using ATTO, AS SSD, CrystalDiskMark, and PCMark05 (only on the empty drive). We’ll start with ATTO. The pink bordered results are empty, the blue bordered results have win7 plus drivers installed.

ATTO

This is a quick little drive, it actually beats the theoretical 270MB/s SATA2 mark on read speeds. You can see it trying to keep cranking them up to SATA3 speeds. On the read side of things is levels off in the 230-238MB/s area, the impressive part is that on 4k file sizes it is already doing just shy of 170MB/s! I tried a queue depth of 10 as well, nothing changed. Let’s run ATTO again with win7 installed…

With data on the drive it levels off at higher speeds on both sides. Really small file size performance deteriorates somewhat, but it’s still fast.

I tried queue depth 10 again, and with win7 on the drive it made a meaningful difference. No difference with large file sizes. Far, far faster with small file sizes, Interesting. The 284MB/s results that keep popping up make me wish I had a mSATA3 port.

AS SSD

Pretty much the same story here, read speeds cap out, write speeds are a bit lower. Still looks pretty fast in general and very fast considering its size. With data on the drive, here’s the story:

That put a dent in 4K performance, it’s still far from slow but the write speeds especially dropped.

CrystalDiskMark

Fast is the best way to describe this, though “very fast” comes to mind as well.

On average it gained speed with windows installed here, too. Looks like a very good daily use drive to me.

PCMark05 Storage Tests

PCMark05 is of limited usefulness as a benchmark, but it has enough of a following that I’m including it anyway.

This is impressively fast in General Usage for any drive, let alone a tiny drive with only four flash chips. It does pretty well in XP Startup, too.

From what I can see this drive really does have performance in the same ballpark as the full size M4 drive. Of course I can’t speak for the peak read speeds due to my unfortunate (and annoying) lack of a mSATA3 port.

Update 9/27/2012:

I received an email from Crucial letting me know that a firmware update has been released for this drive. Below is heart of the email:

While the firmware upgrade is optional, users who elect to install this upgrade will benefit from the following enhancements:

• · Faster boot-up times We improved time to ready—the sliver of time between when the power button is pressed and when the drive is ready to accept commands.
• · Faster TRIM We improved the efficiency of how TRIM works on the drive.
• · Windows 8 certification The new firmware is officially certified for the upcoming Windows 8 OS.
• · Better power management We increased power efficiency during standby mode, which can extend battery life significantly.

 The new firmware update is available now at our Firmware and Downloads section here.

I find this to be pretty impressive, especially faster boot times. It’s all good stuff though and it’s very nice to see Crucial continuing to develop the drives after release. Continued support is excellent.

A further update on 9/28/2012:

In response to comments about systems using the new UEFI BIOS, we’d like to clarify some concerns that have been expressed by users. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a new BIOS architecture shipping with some systems. Even though our firmware code itself is compatible with systems utilizing the UEFI BIOS, we issued our original UEFI note because we noticed instances where our update tools do not recognize the SSD with some systems using UEFI. The target device is not recognized as an updateable device during the reboot process. If this happens, the firmware update will not occur, and users will retain the firmware version they started with. Windows will then restart normally. If this sequence occurs, customers cannot upgrade to this firmware version at this time. However, it’s important to note that in this instance they’ve done no harm to their system or data. For those customers who have already successfully updated their firmware, rolling back to older versions is not necessary and not recommended.

We chose to make this firmware available because the vast majority of Crucial customers are not using UEFI-based systems, and we wanted to get the benefits of this upgrade out to the majority of our users. We are working on UEFI-compatible tools and expect to have them available within the next month.