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Crucial M4 256GB Sata 3 SSD

Life in the fast lane

Magnetic dissed

Before delving into the more technical benchmarks, here’s a quick reminder of why you should be considering ditching your old magnetic storage in favour of an SSD:

The M4 breathed new life into my old 3GHz E6850-based test rig which usually takes around 48 seconds to boot Window 7 x64 from an ancient 7200 RPM SATA 3Gb/s Seagate drive, which has seen far too much abuse. With the M4 installed it now takes 15.8 seconds – short of a major CPU upgrade, an SSD is the best performance addition you can really go for.

Crucial M4

ATTO confirms the same results as before, 350MB/s reads and 210 MB/s writes

CrystalDiskMark shows some quite promising results with 1GB sequential and 512KB reads blitzing past 300MB/s while the corresponding write operations come in just a hair over 200MB/s. Not seeing the promised 415MB/s reads or 260MB/s writes though…

The story with AS SSD benchmark is very much the same; still fairly impressive, but not quite what Crucial promised. Looking further, it can be seen that the peak 40K IOPS read is achieved, but write performance falls 20K short of the 50K IOPS goalpost. Just because these aren’t the ideal numbers is no reason to write off the M4, in comparison to other drive I’ve tested, this still comes out on top, beating even Intel’s new 510 drives.

Next page: Peak performance

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