Crucial's m4 SSD Tested At 64, 128, 256, And 512 GB

[acku]

SSDs are a lot faster than hard drives. But their price tags continue deterring enthusiasts. Less-expensive SSDs are available, but what do you trade off (aside from capacity) when you buy a smaller drive? We test four models from Crucial to find out.

Crucial's m4 SSD Tested At 64, 128, 256, And 512 GB : Read more

 

[wintermint]

I've been recommending the Crucial m4 128gb to people, and after seeing this.. I'm glad I did :]

 

[sceen311]

it'd be nice if they threw a 7200 rpm hardrive on the bench... We don't all have laptops ya know.

 

[compton]

I'm glad this was done. It's rare that you get the chance to stack all the capacity points up (as in never). I bought an Intel 510 120GB and a M4 64GB and my own testing showed that you'd never know the difference besides the capacity (in day to day use, besides lower max write MB/S). I kinda like keeping my system drive to a bare minimum -- just Win7 no swap or hibernate, Office, a few other apps, and then I keep my Steam folder on a separate drive. Simple. I will say that if you are building a new system, cut whatever you have to in order to fit at least a 64GB SSD -- the M4 is excellent at any capacity. I'd rather have to go down to an i3 from a 2500k than from a SSD to a HDD. I get tired of people saying "it's not worth it" and "they're not much faster than a 7200rpm". Those people must be doing it wrong.

 

[beenthere]

Now if they could only make these SSDs reliable, we could all enjoy some performance improvement. Intel, Micron, OCZ and Corsair to name a few have all had reliability/compatibility/firmware issues of some sort resulting in loss of data, which for me is simply unacceptable.

 

[Guest]

Last month I got a 64GB for my laptop and a 128GB m4 for my desktop. So far no issues, and the speed is great. Glad I got the 128GB and not the 256GB.

 

[Guest]

PCMark 7 Storage tests are just pathetic, they have messed some of them up on purpose it seems just to shrink the difference between systems containing SSD and the ones containing HDD only, useless bench from start to "finish"...

 

[ubercake]

These things are still too expensive.

 

[mroanhaus]

I picked up the 64 GB M4 two weeks ago on Newegg for under $90. I am so glad I bought it, the thing makes boot times lightning fast. I have Win7 64-bit, Photoshop, 3DS Max, Google Chrome, and a few little monitoring and Bitcoin mining apps on there and I STILL have 21 GB to spare. Don't buy the 128 GB unless you really need it, throwing Steam and other massive apps will be much better suited on a secondary HDD. SSDs are simply amazing and well worth the money spent, even if you're a cheapass like me they're still affordable. The time saved from having to wait around while booting your computer makes SSDs worth the money imo

 

[burnley14]

See how they all hover pretty close to the same price per gigabyte, while sequential write and random write performance trend upward? Those are the spoils available to folks willing to spend more on higher capacities.

This is true, but in 6 months when the whole lineup is outdated and the next generation of drives blows these ones away, those that spent more are going to have spent the extra money without much purpose.

 

[cknobman]

[citation][nom]burnley14[/nom]This is true, but in 6 months when the whole lineup is outdated and the next generation of drives blows these ones away, those that spent more are going to have spent the extra money without much purpose.[/citation]

Well going by your logic why should anyone ever spend money on anything in technology??? Guess its always a waste huh?

Failed logic.

 

[jerreddredd]

the Reviews on Newegg have been really positive. no DOA or failures. the only issue i have seen is that some laptops have issues with the M4. this is probably a MB Bios issue or driver issue. I have a 256GB Phoenix Pro and my sees how quickly levels load and thinks he needs an SSD too. I am building his new system soon and the M4 is a strong contender for his build. The Vertex3 seems to have a lot of issues right now, which was the other SSD consideration.

 

[burnley14]

[citation][nom]cknobman[/nom]Well going by your logic why should anyone ever spend money on anything in technology??? Guess its always a waste huh? Failed logic.[/citation]

No, not failed logic at all. Go ahead and buy a SSD today, I already have, but why spend 8x as much money on a larger drive to get marginally better performance when everyone knows a better product will be out so soon? My logic would be that for the price of a single large drive, you could buy a smaller drive in this generation, the next, and the one following that for the same amount of money. And odds are that capacities will increase at the same price level in the future as well. Your performance would be substantially greater than just having today's single large drive while spending the same amount of money.

 

[brenro]

[citation][nom]burnley14[/nom]No, not failed logic at all. Go ahead and buy a SSD today, I already have, but why spend 8x as much money on a larger drive to get marginally better performance when everyone knows a better product will be out so soon? My logic would be that for the price of a single large drive, you could buy a smaller drive in this generation, the next, and the one following that for the same amount of money. And odds are that capacities will increase at the same price level in the future as well. Your performance would be substantially greater than just having today's single large drive while spending the same amount of money.[/citation]



The same could be said of every single computer upgrade you could ever do. CPU's, graphics cards, motherboards? By your logic I could never upgrade because something better will soon come out.

 

[dgingeri]

I have an outstanding question regarding SSDs that I've been trying to find for a while now: how does raid performance compare at the same capacity. In other words, I'd like to see the comparison between 4X64GB, 2X128GB, and a single 256GB to see which performs better for the money spent.

I'm currently running a 2X120GB Vertex 2 setup, and I can tell you for certain that it massively outperforms a single 240GB Vertex 2. That was pretty plain with that generation of drives. It's not so clear with this generation, though. Also, since TRIM isn't an option for a raid config, how much performance is sacrificed after it gets used for a while? I haven't lost much at all with my dual Vertex 2 raid after over a year, but it is also only half used. I haven't run out of unused cells yet to see a difference.

Since nobody else has written an article on such things, I would think such a thing would attract readers.

 

[jacobdrj]

[citation][nom]brenro[/nom]The same could be said of every single computer upgrade you could ever do. CPU's, graphics cards, motherboards? By your logic I could never upgrade because something better will soon come out.[/citation]
Yeah. At this point, even a mid-grade SSD has balanced my PC out so much to the point that an upgrade will only happen if my computer dies in a lightning storm... A C2Q with an Agility 2 60gb and a RAID of 500GB Samsung drives with 8 gb of DDR2 RAM and Windows 7 x64 will last me a long long time...

 

[stevelord]

I run a few 128s and 256s at work. So far so good. Although a coworker had the freezing bug and had to update firmware. Beware of this. It is fairly common and allover Crucial's forums.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

I'm looking at the article page with the response time graphs. A human blink of an eye takes between 300ms and 400ms. It would seem then that average and maximum response times would appear to be instantaneous to a human being. What would a gamer or an enthusiast be doing with a ssd for the difference between 64GB and a 512GB ssd response times to be noticeable?

 

[cadder]

1. The recommended 128GB size has a lot of negative feedback on newegg, specifically freezing periodically.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148442

2. I wish Toms would come up with some real world benchmarks for testing SSD's. How long does it take for the computer to boot? How long does it take to load Excel? How long does it take to load Crysis? Things like that. I've seen tests other places that showed how fast a computer would boot, and the difference between the slowest hard drive and the fastest SSD wasn't all that much. I would like to see real world tests of these drives. While the artificial benchmarks show big differences, I'm betting in the real world the differences are very small.

 

[X-Nemesis]

Something tells me that over 90% of the users out there wouldn't notice a difference between a sata 6 ssd and a sata 3 ssd. Eventually all that will be available will be sata 6 but for now, buy a sata 3 last gen model for cheaper price.

 

[jacobdrj]

[citation][nom]X-Nemesis[/nom]Something tells me that over 90% of the users out there wouldn't notice a difference between a sata 6 ssd and a sata 3 ssd. Eventually all that will be available will be sata 6 but for now, buy a sata 3 last gen model for cheaper price.[/citation]
The problem is, while the last gen models are cheaper, they are not THAT MUCH cheaper... It has got to get to $1/GB... It really just has to...

 

[travish82]

I purchased the 128GB model a few months ago after seeing the "Best SSD for the money" article, and this sure does alleviate any buyers remorse that I may have had. I noticed a huge improvement on application load times, and the login screen to desktop fully loaded went from 32 down to to 7 seconds. For some reason, it's always incredibly satisfying to be the first person to load up a MP online game. Maybe since I'm so terrible at them, It makes me feel like I won something

Right now my drive is on a 3MBs SATA. I wonder if I would see much improvement by moving to 6MB. Has anyone seen a good article out there that compares the difference? I'd be very interested to see it. But it'll be a while before I get that since it means a new MoBo, CPU & RAM.

 

[master9716]

TOMS DIDNT TEST RAID. I Wanted to See how much faster 2x 64gb drives are than a 128gb .

 

[master9716]

[citation][nom]travish82[/nom]I purchased the 128GB model a few months ago after seeing the "Best SSD for the money" article, and this sure does alleviate any buyers remorse that I may have had. I noticed a huge improvement on application load times, and the login screen to desktop fully loaded went from 32 down to to 7 seconds. For some reason, it's always incredibly satisfying to be the first person to load up a MP online game. Maybe since I'm so terrible at them, It makes me feel like I won something Right now my drive is on a 3MBs SATA. I wonder if I would see much improvement by moving to 6MB. Has anyone seen a good article out there that compares the difference? I'd be very interested to see it. But it'll be a while before I get that since it means a new MoBo, CPU & RAM.[/citation]
Anandtech has the difference on this drive between 6bg and 3gb its a good difference. Dont know how much it translates to boot time or anything.

 

[dgriffs]

I just recently built a new system with a crucial m4 64 gb ssd as the boot drive. So far I love it and have had no problems. It is paired with samsung spinpoint f3 1tb hdd for all of my games and other data. It is hard to justify spending the money on larger ssd's when regular hard drives are so cheap nowadays. It's nice because I am able to backup windows onto the ssd. I would highly recommend this combo. I still have almost 40gb left on my ssd after installing win 7 home premium 64 bit and a good amount of programs. There is an article on this site about some ssd tweaks that can free up some data.