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REVIEW ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
For those who are not aware, Crucial/Micron was the first company to market a SATA 3 consumer solid state drive and their success in the SSD world is compounded by the fact that they are one of the few to have marketed a product with little to no issues since Day One. As a matter of fact, if the logo ‘Like A Rock’ weren’t already taken, it would fit perfectly here.
Much of that success comes from their partnership with Marvell who has played the underdog in the world of SSD controllers. It goes without mentioning that this ‘underdog’ reputation comes from the uprising of the SandForce family and all but a few manufacturers who were quick to jump for the highest performing controller out of the gate, Crucial/Micron and Samsung being the only not to drink the SandForce koolaid at some point.
Fast forward to today’s tight relationship between Crucial/Micron and Marvell and, as much as many might think the introduction of the 88SS9174 was a great move, I personally think the firmware update that followed was key. It was a firmware update that finally bettered a drives performance at a time that so many had gotten used to updates that would fix their SSD.
As for the Micron C400 mSATA SSD, many of you are probably thinking I went way of course but that couldn’t be further from the truth as the Micron C400 exemplifies all that we just discussed. The C400 significantly moves the bar of mSATA performance to that of all new generation SATA 3 SSDs if we rely on PCMark Vantage to be an accurate measurement of the consumer experience. Although there are a few rare exceptions with respect to benchmark software, PCMark Vantage is generally considered the true measuring stick of consumer SSD performance.
There is, however, a downfall that we see with the C400 and that is the fact that it isn’t yet branded the Crucial M4 mSATA SSD and available to the consumer. For now, if you want one, you would be looking at a notebook/ultrabook purchase.
At the end of the day, we are awarding the Micron C400 mSATA SSD Editor’s Choice as it was very solid throughout testing and it easily surpassed the other SSDs we have tested to date, ranking right up there with the best new gen SATA 3 SSDs we have reviewed.
Great review and information! These are great but just like conventional hard drives with rotating media, they can still fail (in different ways), where backing up data is still necessary to prevent the need for data recovery in the future. There are even some cases where if some of the memory chips fail that the data may not even be recoverable. Aside from that they are not susceptible to movement (shock) like conventional hard drives, weigh less and tend to use less power which can make them an ideal choice for notebook computing.
Where’s products with the new 88SS9187 controller that supports SATA 3.1?
Why the old 88SS9174 controller?
«128GB RAW total. Once formatted, the end user capacity is brought down a bit to 119GB.»
This statement is based on ignoring that the manufacturer quoted capacity is in gigabytes (10 to 9th power) and the one reported by MS-Windows is in gibibytes (2 to the 30th power), and in fact 128 gigabytes is roughly the same capacity is 119 gibibytes, or 128,000,000,000 bytes.
The raw capacity and the formatted capacity are reported to be the same 128GB=119GiB because the partitioning and formatting overheads are fairly small, that is well under 1.07GB=1.0GiB.
Same same different thread eheh. Lets be clear. This SSD contains 4 x 32GB modules for a raw total of 128 GB or gigabytes. Total available user capacity once it is formatted is119GB no matter how you cut it by trying to explain GB and GiB.
The use of Gib and, quite frankly the technical explanation and calculations, is not used on any review site that I am aware of and has no use but to confuse the reader needlessly.