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We have always liked Crucial products, their Ballistix memory for instance was a firm favourite of ours for a long time, finding its way into our review systems on many occasions. Their build quality and warranty terms have always been at the top of their field – when you buy a Crucial product, you know it is a quality item.
For the last couple of weeks we have been concentrating on the new Sandforce powered solid state drives, so it was refreshing to review the Marvell controlled Crucial M4 256GB today. 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. Overall performance is lower, and when compressed data can be utilised, the M4 is markedly slower. This is a similar situation that the Intel SSD 510 faces.
The market right now is fairly one sided, because SandForce products are dominating the performance charts. The 2281 controller is clearly superior to the Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2.
Pricing right now however is very competitive, as the 256GB M4 can be bought directly from Crucial for £370 inc vat. If Crucial could drop this by another £20, it would make the deal that little bit sweeter, especially when the strong five year warranty is factored into the overall purchase cost.
Pros:
- great performance
- works equally well with incompressible and compressible data
Cons:
- the latest Sandforce controller is faster
KitGuru says: A very capable solid state drive, but it faces some very stiff competition from Sandforce 2281.
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?
Sandforce is really in a league of its own right now.
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.
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.
Intel and Crucial just cant compete with SF. they are miles ahead.
I agree, a small price drop would Be a good move for crucial
Sandforce is great but this is a good option, just not quite as quick, most people wouldnt notice
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).
>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,
Its a very old review Jack. there are much more indepth comparisons now in the SSD reviews.