Final Thoughts
Crucial is a name we always know for reliability and quality-made products and the M4 drive is no exception. It is very well made and besides the controller everything else inside is made by Crucial (Micron). Crucial does offer their standard 3 year warranty with the drive, but I would expect it to last much longer than that.
If you look at many of our comparison graphs you may be saying to yourself wait those other drives perform faster. Well they do, but that is because they rely on real-time file compression to achieve their highest levels of performance. In a real world scenario not all data will be able to be compressed. Right now there are only a few solid state drives that can offer real SATA 6GB/s performance without data compression and the M4 is one of those drives.
The performance is actually really, really good. Read speeds are rated at 500MB/s, but we exceeded that in many of our tests, sometimes getting closer to 530MB/s! While write speeds are a little slower at 260MB/s they are solid. Both read and write speeds are constant too, which means they reach their maximum speed quickly and stay there.
The M4 has been out for quite some time and there has not been any major issues with it. We have seen so many solid state drives have issues with firmware, NAND or something. The M4 really has no issues at all and the firmware upgrades have only made the drive faster!
Right now the 256GB version of the M4 is selling for $299.99 at my favorite online retailer. At the price it puts it below the cost of OCZ’s Octane drive and Samsung’s 830 series, both of which do not rely on real-time file compression to achieve their highest levels of performance. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Crucial M4 Solid State Drive a 10 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award.
Pros:
– Exceptional speed
– Does not rely on real-time file compression to achieve highest levels of performance
– 3 year warranty
– Available in up to 512GB capacities
Cons:
– None that I found
