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Crucial M4 256GB SSD Review (C400)

It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.

Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.

The time recorded was 1 second slower than the Corsair Force 3 and OCZ Agility 3 drives. Still a very strong result overall and faster than Intel's 510 120gb SSD.

Again, slightly faster than Intel's 510 120gb drive, but a couple of seconds slower than the OCZ Agility 3 and Corsair Force 3.

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10 comments

  1. Im curious, and no one has ever explained this really well, when would compressible and incompressible data make a difference, isnt ‘windows’ code all compressible data regardless?

  2. Sandforce is really in a league of its own right now.

  3. I always liked crucial, their website is great too which has helped my family in the past when they are looking for upgrades. the scanning capability.

  4. Rumors right now that Sandforce 2281 has some quality control issues, until this is cleared up this might be a better bet. always had a problem with sandforce quality control. Crucial will never have that problem.

  5. Intel and Crucial just cant compete with SF. they are miles ahead.

  6. I agree, a small price drop would Be a good move for crucial

  7. Sandforce is great but this is a good option, just not quite as quick, most people wouldnt notice

  8. Chances are you are using the Intel RST 10.1 drivers (and/or earlier versions). It is buggy when used in conjunction with the M4 and particular firmware because of a buggy Link Power Management setting that is enabled by default by Intel. This is most apparent by the no-score for gaming in Vantage. This Intel driver issue “will” also adversely affect other M4 benchmark scores, even when it’s not readily apparent.

    There are four ways to fix it that I’m aware of:
    1.(this one worked for me in lab troubleshooting before I knew it was a LPM driver issue) Go into device manager and change to MSAHCI driver, reboot, and then change back to Intel RST driver and reboot again.
    2. Upgrade to latest rev firmware
    3. Manually edit LPM registry lines. You’ll have to look up the exact registry enries as I can’t remember them off hand.
    4. Use Intel RST 10.5+ driver versions (available from numerous sources, but probably not WHQL certified yet).

  9. >While the M4 256GB is clearly ahead of the previous generation C300 drives, it is fair
    >to say that it has a tough time competing against the latest Sandforce 2281 powered
    >solid state drives.

    This is late in the game, but I fail to see the “clearly ahead” of the C300 proof when you are comparing a 256G C4 to a 64G C300… the smaller drives are significantly slower than the larger ones, so this is truly NOT a fair comparison. I hope you are comparing apples to apples in current reviews, but I arrived here mainly hoping to find a comparison of the C300 to the newer M4.
    Thanks,

  10. Its a very old review Jack. there are much more indepth comparisons now in the SSD reviews.