Crucial M4 128GB SSD

The year 2011 was quite complex in SSD matters. The industry finally made a move towards SATA3 (6 Gbps) and with that arrived a lot of new controllers and thus SSDs. Earlier in the year the most promising SSDs where based on SandForce 2281 controllers. Unfortunately for SandForce, they got haunted and plagued by firmware issues forcing people to reflash their SSDs, and that's just not ok... as 9 out of 10 times that also invokes your data being lost.

It was in a way too late in Q3 when the firmware bug finally got identified and fixed despite numerous fixes and updates. So though the SandForce 2281 based SSDs run fast as heck and are stable now, the reputation damage was done. SandForce products are no longer the #1 choice for end users.

As weird as it sounds, that firmware bug might be the best thing that could happen for the market really (not for your data though!). See, other players benefited from that massively. Take for example the new Corsair Performance Pro SSD drives that are Marvell based. Or OCZ for example all of the sudden they inject proprietary Indilinx controller based products, there's more players on the market now and that is great for competition, for us as tech-press it was an interesting dynamic to witness in the technology channel alright.

SandForce royally screwed up with the 2000 series versus firmware issues. And I really do want to make very clear that all latest firmwares are stable, for any vendor.  But that doesn't mean that the word is out and the reputation of that controller simple is dented, keeping potential consumers away.

Rise and shine was then applied to the Crucial M4 series, being the perfect example, shine that is. People obviously prefer purchasing a 100% stable product albeit compromising a little on performance here and there.

We are still not there though, we expect a lot of shifts and changes in the SSD arena in the years to come. The SSD market could become a competitive slaughter fest as inevitably prices will go down, very much similar to the drop in memory prices. That means (well at least we think) only the players in the market that have proprietary technology and intellectual property in-house will survive this race. That means at the very least, have either your own controller technology or your own NAND Flash memory.

Hence Intel will be successful, Samsung, OCZ and of course Crucial ....

Crucial is part of Micron, and many SSDs review you have read here on Guru3D.com are based on Micron memory, a huge player in the business. Their Crucial M4 has been a success story ever since the beginning. Consumers lost trust in SandForce and Crucial played their card really well, making their own NAND flash allows them to insert their product into the market at very competitive prices. Combined with a Marvell controller they kick ass in both price and performance. And if things weren't successful enough, earlier this year Crucial launched a firmware update, improving performance by another 20~25% making the product nearly as good as what SandForce SSDs have to offer.

So without doubt the best selling SSD of the year 2011 probably has been the M4 series, and due to that hefty demand Crucial really didn't want to send out samples to press that much, these M4's where selling anyway so why risk anything really. After pushing a little earlier this month Crucial finally agreed to send out a sample, for which we thank them very much as we finally can add Crucial M4 results to our benchmark suite, something I know a lot of you requested.

Obviously the M4 series is nothing other then a success story, and with a lot of  people not trusting SandForce (recently sold to LSI btw) anymore we'll have a peek, after which we'll dive into the technology behind it and obviously we'll present you a nice phat performance overview.

Features & specifications

So the Crucial M4 sample has finally arrived in our underground test facility, it's the 128GB version of the drive, which means it's also slightly slower in writes compared to the 256GB model due to memory channels available. Small side note, you can also spot the very same drive as Micron C400 in the stores.

Initial tests straight away impressed us, this product can keep up with any SandForce SSF-2281 SSD product in terms of read performance and Intel's latest and greatest as well. Have a peek at the official spec sheet of the M4 series.

Crucial M4 SSD 2.5"	CT064M4SSD2	CT0128M4SSD2	CT0256M4SSD2	CT0512M4SSD2
Capacity (Unformatted)	64 GB	128 GB	256 GB	512 GB
NAND	Micron MLC	Micron MLC	Micron MLC	Micron MLC
Controller	Integrated 8-channel single chip	Integrated 8-channel single chip	Integrated 8-channel single chip	Integrated 8-channel single chip
RAID Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Firmware	Field Upgradeable	Field Upgradeable	Field Upgradeable	Field Upgradeable
SATA Transfer Rate	6Gb/s (3Gb/s compatible)	6Gb/s (3Gb/s compatible)	6Gb/s (3Gb/s compatible)	6Gb/s (3Gb/s compatible)
Sequential Read (up to)	415 MB/sec	415 MB/sec	415 MB/sec	415 MB/sec
Sequential Write (up to)	95 MB/sec	175 MB/sec	260 MB/sec	260 MB/sec
Random 4k READ	40,000 IOPS	40,000 IOPS	40,000 IOPS	40,000 IOPS
Random 4k WRITE	20,000 IOPS	35,000 IOPS	50,000 IOPS	50,000 IOPS
PCMark Vantage	55K HDD test score	55K HDD test score	65K HDD test score	65K HDD test score
Dimensions (L x W x H)	100.5 x 69.5 x 9.50 mm	100.5 x 69.5 x 9.50 mm	100.5 x 69.5 x 9.50 mm	100.5 x 69.5 x 9.50 mm
Weight	75g	75g	75g	75g
MTBF	1.2 Million Hours	1.2 Million Hours	1.2 Million Hours	1.2 Million Hours
Data Reliability	Built-in EDC/ECC	Built-in EDC/ECC	Built-in EDC/ECC	Built-in EDC/ECC
Drive Endurance	36TB=20GB per day for 5 years	72TB=40GB per day for 5 years	72TB=40GB per day for 5 years	72TB=40GB per day for 5 years

As said there are four models available, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and an impressive 512GB version, all 6Gbps SATA interface based SSDs. This SATA3 version as such will deliver speeds of up to an advertised 415MB/s of bandwidth in read performance and a 175 MB/sec in write performance (sequential).

BUT ... the specs are all still based on the old firmware release. You'll notice that the performance really is a good 20% above what they advertise, and that surely is a nice additional bonus. With the tested 128GB model (obviously comes with the newest firmware) you'll see that we can even reach 500 MB/sec on sequential reads and roughly 200 MB/sec on writes.

That gives the M4 really nice performance when dealing with compressed data compared to other drives, we'll check that out of course. Sequential read and write performance should be impressive.

The M4 SSDs will include Aynchronous MLC Flash Micron memory chips (yes they make these themselves) as well as a 256MB DRAM cache. The controller used comes from Marvell which thus works with a large memory cache, whereas SandForce uses a segment of the NAND flash the cache. That's the essential difference really, the benefit of a DRAM cache is that you'll have more GB's available for real usage.

The SSDs come with full support for the TRIM command to keep the SSD nice and fast.

• Crucial M4 64GB costs 90 EUR
• Crucial M4 128GB costs 165 EUR
• Crucial M4 256GB costs 320 EUR
• Crucial M4 512GB costs 620 EUR

So these are the prices at this moment, quite competitive. Crucial will get you a 3 year carry-in warranty on the product.

Installation and recommendations

On this page we want to share some thoughts on how to increase the lifespan and performance of your SSD. But first, the installation.

Installation of an SSD drive is no different than installing any other drive. Connect the SATA and power cable, and you are good to go. Once you power on that PC of yours, the first thing you'll notice; no more noise. That by itself is just downright weird opposed to the old fashioned spinning platters in an HDD.

My system boot drive many moons ago was a WD Raptor and when that HD is crunching, you know the HDD is alive alright. That's just no longer a reality. You will look at the SSD wondering "is that thing even working?", while the Windows 7 logo has already appeared on your monitor.

So no more purring and resonating or other weird noises. Completely silent, I like that very much.

The second factor you can rule out is heat. Modern day HDDs tend to get hot, or at the least quite warm. When not cooled down they can reach 40-50 Degrees C pretty easily. No worries though as the HDD can handle it, yet the SSD remains completely cool to lukewarm. Most SSD drives will get to roughly 25 Degrees C, just above room temperature.

Then there's that first boot up on the SSD, weird ... it's fast ... really fast. That's where you'll get the first smile on your face. But let's talk about taking some precautions, remember this is an MLC based drive, we want it to last at least ten years right?

SSD life-span recommendations

Drive wearing on any SSD based drive will always be a ghost in the back of your mind. Here are some recommendations and tips for a long lifespan and optimal performance. Basically, what is needed is to eliminate the HDD optimizations within Vista (that cause lots of small file writes like superfetch and prefetch), things like background HDD defragmentation (that causes lots of small file write drive activity). In short (and this is for Vista and Windows 7):

• Drive indexing disabled. (useless for SSD anyway, because access times are so low).
• Prefetch disabled.
• Superfetch disabled
• Defrag disabled.

With Vista and windows 7, make sure you disable defragmentation on the SSD disk. You do not have a mechanical drive anymore so it is not needed, let alone you do not want defragmentation to wear out your drive, and Vista does this automatically when your PC is in idle (picking it's nose).

For Superfetch/prefetchers and other services, at command prompt just type: services

Use Windows 7 / Vista's services to disable them. To disable defragmentation:

Windows 7 and Vista Automatic Defrag:

1. Click Start

2. Click Control Panel

3. Select the Control Panel Home

4. Click System and Maintenance

5. Under the Administrative Tools section at the bottom, click Defragment your hard drive

6. You may need to grant permission to open the disk defragmenter

7. Click or unclick Run automatically (disable) depending if you want this feature enabled or disabled.

8. Click OK

OR alternatively at the Vista start prompt just type : dfrgui

Now over time your SSD will get a little fragmented but it's NAND flash and there's no mechanical head moving back and forth to access that data so just leave it disabled.

Windows 7 and the SSD TRIM feature

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 support the TRIM function, which the OS'es use when they detect that a file is being deleted from an SSD.

When the OS deletes a file on an SSD, it updates the file system but also tells the SSD via the TRIM command which pages should be deleted. At the time of the delete, the SSD can read the block into memory, erase the block, and write back only pages with data in them. The delete is slower, but you get no performance degradation for writes because the pages are already empty, and write performance is generally what you care about.

Note that the firmware in the SSD has to support TRIM.

TRIM only improves performance when you delete files. If you are overwriting an existing file, TRIM doesn't help and you'll get the same write performance degradation as without TRIM. In AHCI mode TRIM is activated automatically.

Enable AHCI

The last and great tip we want to give you to gain a little extra performance boost is that you should enable AHCI mode. AHCI mode can help out greatly in performance for SSDs. Now, if you swap out an HDD for an SSD with the operating system cloned and THEN enable AHCI in the BIOS, you'll likely get a boot error / BSOD.

The common question is, is there a solution for this ?

To answer that question (and as we do safely with all modern chipsets) there is a way to safely enable AHCI mode. Here we go:

1. Startup "Regedit"

2. Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SYSTEM / CurrentControlset / Services

3. Open msahci 

4. In the right field left click on "start" and go to Modify 

5. In the value Data field enter "0" and click "ok"

6. exit "Regedit" 

7. Reboot Rig and enter BIOS (typically hold "Delete" key while Booting)

In your BIOS select "Integrated Peripherals" and OnChip PATA/SATA Devices. Now change SATA Mode from IDE to AHCI.

You now boot into windows 7 or Vista, and the OS will recognize AHCI and install the devices. Now the system needs one more reboot and voilla ... enjoy the improved SSD performance.