Crucial m4 256GB SSD Review

Crucial announced worldwide availability of its next-generation solid-state drive late last month. Known simply as the "m4," the company's latest entry is hailed as the successor to its award-winning RealSSD C300, promising to deliver more speed and higher capacities. Despite those claims, we can't help but feel the m4 has some big shoes to fill.
The C300 was somewhat of a milestone for the consumer SSD market, being the only flash drive available with SATA 6Gb/s support for quite some time. Whereas most SSD makers opted for the SandForce SF-1200 controller with a peak read rate of 285MB/s, the C300 could hit speeds of 355MB/s courtesy of its Marvell "Van Gogh" 88SS9174 chip.
On top of excelling at sequential throughput, the C300 provided strong random performance when working with files of all sizes, making it a well-rounded contender. However, it's been more than a year since the RealSSD C300 landed, and a lot has changed in that time. Above all, the latest SandForce SATA 6Gb/s controllers have been a real game changer.

OCZ has undoubtedly delivered the finest SandForce-based product in the current generation. Powered by the SF-2281, the Vertex 3 (240GB) offers read and write speeds of up to 550MB/s and 520MB/s. Needless to say, the drive blew us away when we reviewed it last month, earning our "Outstanding!" award after topping our real world speed tests.
While the Vertex 3 is representing things on the SandForce front, Intel has recently launched its performance-oriented SSD 510 Series, touting reads and writes of 500MB/s and 315MB/s. The 510 Series surprised us a bit as it's outfitted with Intel's dated 34nm MLC NAND flash chips and a Marvell 88SS9174 controller instead an Intel-made chip.
Interestingly, Crucial has also decided to equip its m4 drives with the Marvell 88SS9174 controller, though the company has opted for more cost-effective 25nm flash memory. As a result, the 256GB model is currently fetching $1.95 per gigabyte, while the 250GB version of the Intel SSD 510 Series is considerably more expensive at $2.40 per gigabyte.
Considering its intended price point, we shouldn't expect the m4 to dethrone the OCZ Vertex 3 and perhaps not even Intel's SSD 510. Nonetheless, we could be in for a pleasant surprise if Crucial's newest contender delivers performance in excess of what the RealSSD C300 did in its heyday, so let's press on and find out what the m4's made of.

Crucial m4 Features & Design

Crucial claims the m4 can achieve read speeds of up to 415MB/s, which is 17% higher than the C300's quoted figures. Write speeds vary between models with the 64GB iteration starting at 95MB/s, followed by the 128GB at 175MB/s, while the 256GB and 512GB versions tout a write throughput of 260MB/s. Compared to the C300, the m4's write speeds are faster by 27%, 25% and 20%, respectively.

Crucial's new drive utilizes the Marvell 88SS9174 controller along with a large Micron 256MB cache to improve small write performance and eliminate any 'stuttering' issues. This has effectively been doubled from the C300's 128MB cache, so we're curious to see if small writes are noticeably improved.


The m4's flash NAND memory is made by Micron, which unsurprising considering Micron owns Crucial. Our 256GB review unit is equipped with 16x16GB 25nm chips (29D128G08CFAAB) and feature Micron's high-speed ONFI 2.1 NAND interface for 166 MT/s with 512-byte industry standard sector size.
Crucial says its m4 series has a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 1.2 million hours, which is somewhat more conservative of an estimate than the ~1.5 million hours you'll find on most other SSDs. To accompany the usual MTBF figure, Crucial also provides a drive endurance rating for each model.


The 64GB m4 is supposedly good for 36TB of data, while the larger models have a rating of 72TB. While that might not sound too impressive, 72TB breaks down to an average of 40GB per day for five years, which is quite a bit for standard use. Besides, the m4 will be ancient history in five years anyway.
In terms of physical durability, Crucial claims that the m4 offers a shock resistance of 1500G, and that's pretty typical among competing flash products. The company's new drives can also operate reliably at temperatures of up to 70 degrees Celsius and will survive 85 degrees when non-operational.
Like all SSDs, the m4 cites very low power consumption figures. At idle, all four models use less than 100mW. When active, the 64GB and 128GB versions consume just 150mW, while the 256GB and 512GB models have a rating of 160mW and 280mW -- the latter of which is still exceptionally low.

The m4 series measures 100.5 x 69.85 x 9.50mm and weighs 75 grams. The drives are compatible with both laptops and desktops, though you'll need an adapter if your chassis doesn't have a 2.5" bay. They'll also work in RAID if you buy more than one and are backed by a limited three-year warranty.

How We Test, System Specs

The Intel SSD 510 Series 120GB, OCZ Vertex 3 and Crucial RealSSD C300 feature SATA 6Gb/s connectivity, requiring us to test using the Sandy Bridge (LGA1155) platform. All other 3Gb/s drives were tested on our older LGA1366 platform, but this shouldn't affect the results. A few select SATA 3Gb/s drives were tested on our LGA1155 system to check for accuracy, both synthetic and real-world performance were much the same. In addition to our featured flash devices, the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM hard drive has been included for comparison's sake. Other SSDs tested for comparison feature controllers such as the SandForce SF-1200, JMicron JMF616, Intel PC29AS218A, Marvell 88SS9174, Toshiba TC58NCF618GBT and Samsung S3C29MAX01. Our testing suite consists of four synthetic benchmark programs and our own file copying and load time tests. As you likely know, while manufacturers claim impressive peak I/O performance out of the box, this performance can diminish over time. Unlike a conventional hard drive, any write operation made to an SSD is a two-step process: a data block must be erased and then written to. Obviously if the drive is new and unused there will be nothing to erase and therefore the first step can be bypassed, but this only happens once unless the drive is trimmed.
Considering this, we'll test how much performance you can expect to lose from each SSD over time. We'll examine all drives in their clean unused state, and then run the HD Tach full benchmark several times to fill the entire drive. This simulates heavy usage and clearly indicates of how performance will be affected after normal long-term use.
All drives in this roundup support the Windows 7 TRIM function, which is meant to counteract these negative effects.

SATA 6Gb/s System Specs
- Intel Core i7-2600K (LGA1155)
- x2 4GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill (CAS 8-8-8-20)
- Asus P8P67 Deluxe (Intel P67)
- OCZ ZX Series (1250w)
- Intel SSD 510 Series 120GB
- Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB
- OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
- Asus GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)

Software
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
- Nvidia Forceware 270.51

SATA 3Gb/s System Specs
- Intel Core i7-965 EE (LGA1366)
- x3 2GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill (CAS 8-8-8-20)
- Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58)
- OCZ ZX Series (1250w)
- Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB
- Kingston SSDNow V+ 100 256GB
- Kingston SSDNow V 100 256GB
- OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB
- OCZ Vertex 2 Pro 100GB
- OCZ Vertex 120GB
- Intel SSD 320 Series 300GB
- Samsung 470 Series 256GB
- Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB
- Asus GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)


Software
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
- Nvidia Forceware 270.61

Benchmarks: File Copy Test

When copying a single large file, the Crucial m4 256GB is only 8% slower than the OCZ Vertex 3 240GB with a throughput of 145.9MB/s. Conversely, it blasted past its predecessor, clocking in at 34% than the RealSSD C300 256GB. The m4 also managed to outpace the Intel 320 and 510 Series drives -- if only by 3% in the latter case.

The Vertex 3 showed us what it's made of during the program copy test, which is comprised of many small non-compressed files (6104 files totaling 2.75GB). The m4 was 29% slower than OCZ's flagship offering, producing a throughput of 139.8MB/s. On the bright side, it was 27% faster than Crucial's old RealSSD C300.

The game copy evaluation is a mixture of small and large, compressed and non-compressed files (1336 files in this test weighing 2.70GB). The m4 managed to roughly match Vertex 3's performance with an impressive throughput of 187.7MB/s. It was also 25% faster than the 510 Series and 38% faster than the RealSSD C300.

Benchmarks: Real-World Applications

The Windows 7 boot time test is measured from the moment the OS loading screen appears to the time the Windows desktop is fully loaded. Crucial's m4 jumps into the 10-second bracket, beating the C300's time by 26%. While it fared 30% better than Intel's 320 and 510 Series, it couldn't quite exceed the Vertex 3's 8.8-second showing.

For the application load test, we launch the following applications on Windows' startup: Internet Explorer, Outlook 2007, Access 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Publisher 2007, Word 2007 and Photoshop CS4. The test starts when the Windows 7 startup sound plays until the final application is loaded and accessible.
The m4's Windows 7 multitasking performance was typical for a high-speed SSD, taking just 5.3 seconds or 0.6 seconds longer than the fastest SSD we've tested. While this did make it 0.2 seconds slower than the RealSSD C300, the results are within our margin of error for this kind of test, which is conducted using a stopwatch.

This test measures the time it takes to launch Adobe Photoshop CS4. Whereas the fastest SSDs take just a second to load Photoshop CS4, we found that the Crucial m4 256GB took 2.1 seconds. In less relative terms, that's twice as slow as the RealSSD C300, Vertex 3 and Samsung 470 Series and on par with Intel's SSD 320 Series.

We recorded the above results while loading StarCraft II's single player campaign (starting when the loading screen appears and stopping once the "click to play" message appears). The m4 was slightly slower than the C300. With a load time of 19.4 seconds, it was also 47% slower than the 510 Series and twice as slow as the old Vertex 2.

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