Crucial RealSSD M4 128GB Solid State Drive Review

Solid State Drives come in a variety of sizes and from a plethora of manufacturer's but when we focus on what the consumer actually needs, it's all quite simple. They are after a SSD that is quick, cost effective and has the capacity that they need. For the mass market, 240GB upwards is still overkill, and the 60-96GB market isn't quite large enough, so for a company to offer 128GB capacities can only mean good things, as it offers an ample amount of space for your operating system and in most cases, for your favourite games. Now we've seen an array of SSDs from the likes of OCZ and Patriot to name a few, but today we had the M4 from Crucial land at our desk. Being something new for us always gets us excited, especially when it's an SSD and it's from the likes of Crucial. We say this, because as we know, Crucial were one of the first to jump onto the SATA III interface with the C300 range of SSDs, even if the technology to support it wasn't quite there yet. These days, we're seeing SATA III based SSDs everywhere, from a variety of brands including some lesser known names, but it all adds into the competition and if you can offer something unique or better whilst remaining cost effective, then you can't lose, right? Crucial believe that they have the complete package with the M4 and with their trusted branding and reputation behind them, we can only hold high hopes for this particular SSD, so lets see what it can do as we take a closer look. From a first glance, we can see that the M4 packaging has been aimed more towards a professional audience, opposed to the enthusiast, as we see no gimmicks, but instead, a nice set of ambient colours and artwork and a simple amount of information darted around the edge. On the back we find the simplistic layout continues with a brief amount of information in various languages including detail on how you can get in contact with Crucial support by a variety of different means. Opening things up, we find a few added accessories including a installation guide, data transfer kit quick start guide, cloning software, SATA interface to USB cable for cloning the drive and of course the drive itself in an anti-static bag and protective packaging. The drive is typical 2.5" form factor and is made up from a grey metal casing with a sticker in the middle that follows on with the ambient, professional styling that we saw on the box. There are also four mounting holes depending on how you are going to be installing the drive, and whether it will be in a desktop PC or laptop. Flipping the drive over, we find the same grey metal styling with another sticker in the middle. This sticker, unlike the front one has relevant information on the drives size and speed, firmware revision and part/serial numbers. It is worth noting the firmware revision is 0009 which shows that Crucial are very keen to keep their products up to date and to stay on top of any problems that may arise over time. If your particular device is being installed into a Desktop PC or certain style laptop, you may require some form of an adapter, and with them being manufactured to an industry standard fitting, the mounting points are spaced out in the right locations on the side of the drive. Much like the mounting points, you'll find the SATA data and power connectors positioned in the correct place so that the drive can be used in all systems that follow the same design and layout. Ripping the drive to part by unscrewing four corner screws, we find the PCB featuring a Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2 controller which is said to improve the write IOPS, offer faster transfer rates and also include support for 25nm MLC NAND flash from Micron of which we find eight on this side. The same controller is used in lots of other drives on the market, and is a big improvement on the older BJP2 controller that Marvell used to offer. Turning the PCB over, we find another eight Micron 25nm MLC NAND flash chips and also a 128MB cache buffer which is also manufactured by Micron. Throughout the testing of an SSD, there are many aspects to consider including the hardware that is used in conjunction. If testing a SATA III based drive, we need to make sure that our motherboard conforms to the same standards so that no discrepancies can arise. Test system: Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z Intel Core i7 2600k 8GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC Corsair H80 Kingston V+100 128GB SSD OCZ Vertex 3 240GB Corsair HX1050W We would like to thank Asus, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible. Software used: AS SSD ATTO CrystalDiskMark PCMark 7 PCMark Vantage The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system caches. In Sequential tests the program measures the time it takes to read a 1GB file to write respectively. In terms of read speeds, the M4 performed very nicely in the sequential tests, whereas the write speed was quite a bit lower than we expected and whilst the larger size M4 capacities may offer better results here, they can't match up to some other SandForce driven SSDs on the market. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. In ATTO, we tend to look at the 1024 test and though the read speed was good at 544MB/s, the write speed was very much similar to what we saw in AS SSD at 198MB/s which for the average user will be ample and is actually above what Crucial claim in terms of write speeds. CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enable you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds. Here are some key features of "CrystalDiskMark": Sequential reads/writes Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes Text copy Change dialog design internationalization (i18n) Consistency was key with the M4 as we saw very similar results when working with the sequential speeds in CrystalDiskMark. PCMark Vantage is the first objective hardware performance benchmark for PCs running 32 and 64 bit versions of Microsoft Windows Vista. PCMark Vantage is perfectly suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft Windows Vista PC from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops to dedicated workstations and hi-end gaming rigs. Regardless of whether the benchmarker is an artist or an IT Professional, PCMark Vantage shows the user where their system soars or falls flat, and how to get the most performance possible out of their hardware. PCMark Vantage is easy enough for even the most casual enthusiast to use yet supports in-depth, professional industry grade testing. PCMark is a good piece of software that allows you to compare results from one system to another. As you can see, we scored 49,362 PCMark Vantage points, which sadly is a bit lower than the likes of the Vertex 3 but still a reasonable score. The way that particular memory works on an SSD compared to others can really be seen when we look at the results, with the drive being especially stong when importing pictures to Windows Photo Gallery and using Windows Media Center. PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows for home and business use. PCMark 7 provides a set of 7 PC tests for measuring different aspects of PC performance with a high degree of accuracy. Overall system performance is measured by the PCMark test. The Lightweight test measures the capabilities of entry level systems and mobility platforms unable to run the full PCMark test. Common use performance is measured by the Entertainment, Creativity and Productivity tests. Component performance is measured by the Computation and Storage hardware tests. One can rely on the Storage test to test SSDs and external hard drives, as well as the system drive. PCMark 7 works a bit differently and is better for comparison purposes and allows you test your own drive and use our above results to compare. We mentioned earlier that we've had a few solid state drives pass through our hands lately and they all differ in many ways, though a lot of consumers won't see this at first glance. Simply put, they all look the same, even when you open it up, we find a PCB with some chips and a controller, so users automatically assume that they are all very much of a muchness. You'd be wrong, as it all depends on the task in hand and the memory and controller both play a part in giving you different results. You could spend thousands on a PCI-Express based SSD which would give you performance like no other, but depending on what you're going to use it for, would you really notice a difference? Half the time, the answer would be no, and you'd be better of saving some money and buying yourself something pretty instead. This is where the M4 comes into play, as it doesn't lie or give you any over indulgent figures but instead, sticks to the truth and at a very attractive price too. A lot of SSDs on the market claim to give you speeds of up to 550MB/s read and up to 500MB/s write but this is never the case. Crucial tell you that it does 500MB/s read and 175MB/s write. Now, this may not sound amazing compared to some other drives on the market, but saving yourself £60 for something you may not even notice certainly gets you listening. Though Crucial market these speeds, in all of our tests saw above and beyond this with 520MB/s read speeds and 200MB/s write speeds, meaning that the user will be even happier knowing that they've got something extra than what the marketing and sales documents stated. Where this drive really comes alive is its value, and at £148.94 for the 128GB model, you're certainly going to be happy with your purchase. The fact that Crucial keep on top of things in terms of firmware also gives you the piece of mind that you know you're getting the latest, current version and retailers even let you know of this fact, before you buy it. The M4 is definitely a rival to the abundance of SandForce driven SSDs on the market, that are tried and tested, and we hope that by looking at the 128GB model, it gives a clear understanding of why you don't need to spend the extra money to get the same results, in certain circumstances, but as with any purchase, it's all down to personal preference and what's the right product for you.