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Just a quick note to pass on that Crucial M4 SSDs were made available for public purchase this morning and can be bought from Crucial direct by following this link!
You may remember our original review which can be found here.
Of particular interest just might be the pricing as we are seeing great prices for the 64GB, 128GB and 256GB at $129, $299 and $499 mark which seems to be a low for the new gen SATA 3 family.
Prices have gone up a bit since their original estimate (shown below) but this SSD is still the lowest available for generation, performance and price. In fact, the Crucial M4 512GB SSD comes in at around $999 where its competition can be found at Newegg in the 480GB capacity for $1899.
As you can see, they haven’t quite updated their banners as of yet but a quick click will send you directly to the new M4 Sales Page!
Lets take a quick look and see exactly why this SSD received our coveted Editors Choice Award. Here is what we said!
CRUCIAL M4 256GB SATA 3 SSD VANTAGE HDD SUITE RESULTS
The Crucial M4 256GB SATA 3 SSD scored a high of an incredible 60951 points as compared to only 42934 points that we saw in the new Intel 510 Series SSD with the same Marvell processor only a few weeks ago. Lets show a comparison of the Crucial to the Intel where Vantage provides transfer speeds of eight typical user activities in simulated scenarios:
As the 8 tests of Vantage are based on real typical user computing patterns, Vantage gives very little weight to the high sequential transfer speeds that are hardly ever used and elects to rely upon 4k random reads and writes for the majority of point calculation. This is because we use these disk access methods over 50% of the time where we use the high sequential disk access methods less than 1%.
Its a clear indication of the pace in which SSDs are progressing when we see a SSD such as the Crucial M4 SATA 3 series better two ICH10 RAID configurations of Crucials former generation C300 series SATA 3 SSD. In fact, if you care to compare this drive to any RAID SSDs on the market today, its right up there beside the OCZ RevoDrive.
CONCLUSIONS
The only words that seem to come to mind right now are ‘Lesson learned’. Crucial has sent us a product that is not only the best performing 2.5″ SSD drive on the market today, but also, we have no doubt of its positioning as other SATA 3 SSDs are released. Although the M4’s SATA 3 scores are as expected, its true strength lies in its absolutely amazing 4k random write performance of 98MB/s which translates to real life performance.
With respect to pricing, we haven’t found the M4 listed just yet but we have found the C400 advertised and might predict that they will be one in the same. This would mean the 64GB would be offered at $129.99, 128GB at $244.99, 256GB at $454.99 and 512GB at $919.99. Quite frankly, the consumer favorite capacity of 256GB is a steal when you consider the Intel 510 250GB is listing at $614 and the Corsair P3 256GB is listing at $749.
Let the price wars begin!