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REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
With many awaiting availability of the new Crucial M4 mSATA SSD this week, timing of this Micron C400 mSATA Review couldn’t be better. We might amusingly take a crack at getting the new Crucial M4 sent out for review but Crucial/Micron Reps would probably laugh and state that the new M4 sticker is in the mail.
There is alot to be said about the C400 mSATA SSD and it starts with Crucial/Micron’s decision some time ago to stick with the Marvell 88SS9174 controller and perfect it’s firmware with Marvell. As a result, the 9174 has gained a reputation as a workhorse and reliability with any Marvell controlled product just seems to be a given.
Performance is shown time and time again in every one of our benchmarks and the results speak to consistency more than many SSDs we have reviewed to date. The C400 doesn’t miss a beat and this is truly shown in its AS SSD Copy Bench result which is one of the fastest we have seen from any form factor SSD yet. Some might wonder as this SSD doesn’t brag about it’s read ‘and write’ speeds above 500MB/s, however, the C400 does wonderful things with incompressible data; this data being the norm for such things as movies, photographs and music. Nice turn out Micron and worthy of Editor’s Choice once again!
Check Out Crucial M4 mSATA SSDs at Amazon!
The Mushkin Atlas SATA III mSATA SSD is still not reviewed here?????
Only found out yesterday that one is on its way…so it will be soon enough.
Nice review. But what about power consumption ? I would like to put one msata in my dell laptop. Is there any big difference between the Crucial and the ADATA ?
Typically, we don’t address power consumption as it is not indicative of something the typical consumer concerns themselves with. See below for manufacturer listed specs:
C400 – 85/200mW
ADATA – .45/1.5W
Could this be as good as having Samsung 830 256GB SSD? ( not mSata version )? I am thinking to use this with 7.2K RPM 750GB , but not sure if its worth using SSD or mSata SSd with HDD? Thanks
We have done the 830 Series 512GB notebook form factor review and it is here:
https://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/samsung-830-series-sata-3-512gb-ssd-review-amazing-performance-and-an-unbeatable-toolbox/
As for performance between the 2.5″ and mSATA, we had initially seen mSATAs with performance below notebook drives but that doesnt appear to be the case any longer.
I have found that AS SSD transfer testing is not accurate. If you manually transfer a large file and I guarantee you the transfer rate is nowhere near what AS SSD shows.
Thanks Bill but we find it’s results to be consistent, not only in this analysis but also, in every analysis we have done and used it on the site.
umm…pretty sure Bill Gates doesn’t know how to use a computer
You need to turn off your virus scanner. On access virus scanning really hurts transfer performance of fast SSDs. The reason why AS SSD doesn’t show this degradation is that AS SSD writes to a pre-created file and is not reading from another drive, so the virus scanner isn’t triggered.
I dont run AV
Is this available anywhere on the web?
Useful review, thanks Les. Thinking of getting one for my Lenovo T420s (which has an mSATA slot) but as yet, Crucial’s compatibility tool is marking them as not compatible with any of the Thinkpads. Given what you mentioned about the Thinkpad market for mSATA upgrades I’m guessing they’re being over cautious, wondering if you have any thoughts on this. Thanks.
I have yet to find ANY mSATA incompatible with any of my laptops and, specifically the X100, we did testing of serveral drives. Yes, they will list it as incompatible until tested. I can not for the life of me see any reason why one mSATA would be compatible while another would not though. They all serve the same purpose in the same way after all.
Sounds sensible – thanks. Keep up the great work on these reviews – much appreciated. Cheers
Keep an eye out for our Mushkin Atlas mSATA review today or tomorrow.
I have the Crucial M4 mSATA 256GB model on order. It should arrive later this week. Looking forward to using it. Thanks for the review Les.
No prob Keith… Hope all goes well!!!
Hy, first of all, I would like to thank you for the huge amount of information I found on this site. Nice review, Im almost convinced about this one but Im not sure my lenovo Y570 would support sata3 in the msata slot. Im wondering if you have any information regarding this :). I plan to use it as my boot drive with the original 2,5″ hdd as a “movie shelf”. The other options Im considering are -OCZ Nocti mSATA 120GB
-Crucial RealSSD M4 mSATA SSD 128GB
-Adata XPG SX300 128GB mSATA
They have almsot the same price and rigth now i cant deside wether to go for 256gb or just stay with 128gb. The 128gb range seems more valuable.
If you could help me decide I would really appreciate. Thanks
a quick check seems to return that it is SATA 3 so I might suggest confirmation through a Google search. The next question deals with capacity as the three others you highlighted seem to be lower capacity drives. as for my choice of the bunch…..no need to answer on that one!
Very useful review!
Having one question though:
NAND IC’s use dual die internally or not? 4K Random reads should be greater if so, if not it’s explained in a way (less channels)