Crucial M4 128GB Review + BenchMarks





Crucial has been a good SSD brand and become famous when they launch their 512GB SSD and people known that they always come with some innovation, some time they fails but they count it and come back strongly than before.As weird as it sounds, that firmware bug might be the best thing that could happen for the market really (not for your data though!). See, other players benefited from that massively. Take for example the new Corsair Performance Pro SSD drives that are Marvell based. Or OCZ for example all of the sudden they inject proprietary Indilinx controller based products, there's more players on the market now and that is great for competition, for us as tech-press it was an interesting dynamic to witness in the technology channel alright.SandForce royally screwed up with the 2000 series versus firmware issues. And I really do want to make very clear that all latest firmwares are stable, for any vendor.  But that doesn't mean that the word is out and the reputation of that controller simple is dented, keeping potential consumers away.Rise and shine was then applied to the Crucial M4 series, being the perfect example, shine that is. People obviously prefer purchasing a 100% stable product albeit compromising a little on performance here and there.We are still not there though, we expect a lot of shifts and changes in the SSD arena in the years to come. The SSD market could become a competitive slaughter fest as inevitably prices will go down, very much similar to the drop in memory prices. That means (well at least we think) only the players in the market that have proprietary technology and intellectual property in-house will survive this race. That means at the very least, have either your own controller technology or your own NAND Flash memory.Continuing the tradition of our award-winning solid-state drives, the Crucial m4 offers mobile and desktop users scorching-fast read and write speeds. Low power, lightweight, and durable, it empowers high-speed synchronous MLC NAND, advanced controller technology, optimized NAND management, and the SATA 6Gb/s interface. Together, that technology dramatically improves data transfers for bandwidth-demanding applications.Our products are built on decades of design and manufacturing expertise. It is our expertise in NAND technology that enables us to optimize the performance and endurance necessary to build quality solid-state storage devices.
So without doubt the best selling SSD of the year 2011 probably has been the M4 series, and due to that hefty demand Crucial really didn't want to send out samples to press that much, these M4's where selling anyway so why risk anything really. After pushing a little earlier this month Crucial finally agreed to send out a sample, for which we thank them very much as we finally can add Crucial M4 results to our benchmark suite, 

As Crucial describe its Tech Features :

- Sequential Read (up to): 415MB/sec (SATA 6Gb/s)
- Sequential Write (up to): 175MB/sec (SATA 6Gb/s)
- Random 4k Read: 40,000 IOPS
- Random 4k Write: 35,000 IOPS
- PCMark Vantage: 55K HDD Test Score
- Interface: SATA 6Gbps / Backwards Compatible 3Gbps
- Native TRIM support
- Seek Time: .1ms
- Slim 2.5" Design
- 100.5 x 69.85 x 9.5mm
- Lightweight: 75g
- Operating Temp: 0°C ~ 70°C
- Storage Temp: -40°C ~ 85°C
- Low Power Consumption: 150 mW in operation, .85 mW in standby
- Shock Resistant up to 1500G
- RAID Support
- MTBF: 1.2 million hours
- Limited 3-Year Warranty.

Let stop theory and do some BenchMark work....














  • Nice Design.
  • Good Read Performance.
  • Decent Price.
  • Reliable.
  • Poor Write Performance.
  • Shaky Performance.
  • Poor performance as a SATA 3 SSD.