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When Crucial released the C300 series of Solid State Drives last year they outperformed anything else available at the time. With read speeds around 340MB/s the Sandforce drives had a serious performance disadvantage, only offering around 280MB/s. The market today is in a very different state and the new SATA 6bps Crucial M4 has to compete against the stunningly good Sandforce 2281 controller featuring in OCZ, Corsair and ADATA drives.
One of the benefits of the Crucial solid state drives has always been the fact they don't rely on compression algorithms to achieve the maximum rated levels of performance whereas Sandforce drives are heavily tied into compressible data techniques. With an updated Marvell controller, the latest Crucial M4 drive should mark a serious attack against the Sandforce drives, but is it enough?
Quick overview:
- Groundbreaking SATA SSD performance
- Read speeds up to 415MB/s
- Second-generation SATA 6Gb/s w/ Native Command Queuing (3Gb/s backward compatible)
The M4 SSD arrives in a very stylish white and blue box …
This box opens up in a gatefold design revealing the drive inside. There are two versions of this drive, one with a data transfer kit, costing £15 extra.
The drive is supplied in an understated chassis with the Crucial name on the front and specifications on the back.
The Crucial M4 256GB drive uses the Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2 controller which is the new version of the 88SS9174-BJP2 processor used in the previous range of C300 drives. There is also a large 256MB of DRAM memory onboard which is used as a cache.
There are four sizes of M4 released – 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB and they all use the same internal design with NAND connected to the controller across eight channels. The 256GB model we are reviewing today uses 16×16 (2x channel) Micron NAND, which is 25nm. As with previous drives in this series the smaller capacity drives use lower density NAND which means that performance is reduced.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Monitor: Dell U2410
Other Drives for comparisons:
Corsair Force 3 120GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB
ADATA S511 240GB
Intel 510 120GB
Corsair F100 100GB
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB
Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
HD Tach
CrystalMark
AS-SSD Benchmark
IOMeter
PCMark Vantage
PCMark 7
SiSoft Sandra
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.
A fantastic set of results for the Crucial M4, scoring over 410MB/s in the sequential read test and 238 MB/s in the 4k QD32 write test.
With incompressible data, the Marvel controller inside the Crucial M4 powers out way ahead of the Sandforce 2281 drives.
When compressible data is enabled via the ‘oxoo fill' setting, the performance of the Sandforce drives outclass the Marvell unit (see 3 images above). The scores for the Crucial M4 256GB don't change much, if at all, with this setting enabled.
I have been using HDTach for many years now and always find it is an invaluable benchmark to ascertain potential levels of performance. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.
Very close scoring from all the drives on test, between 360MB/s and 380 MB/s.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
The M4 delivers great performance, but it is considerably behind the Sandforce 2281 powered drives from OCZ, Corsair and ADATA.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
AS SSD uses incompressible data. The Crucial M4 256gb performs above the Corsair Force 3 120gb and OCZ Agility 3 240GB, but behind the OCZ Vertex 3 and ADATA S511 240GB drives.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.
IOPS performance is behind the most recent Sandforce powered drives, scoring just under 38,000. The Vertex 3 240gb MAX IOPS drive by comparison scores a staggering 64,546.
We use Futuremark’s PCMark Vantage in many of our system reviews and we felt that it was worth an inclusion in this review. It is still a synthetic suite, but it uses many real world characteristics to try and judge overall performance levels. We are using the 64 bit version of the HDD Suite for this testing. We also compare against a Samsung F1 1TB drive on this page.
A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security. From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.
The gaming test gave a continual error for us, with a blank score. The other tests however indicate competitive overall performance, leading some tests, such as Windows Startup, and trailing behind the Sandforce drives in a few others.
PCMark 7 is the latest benchmark suite from Futuremark and it includes 7 separate test suites combining more than 20 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming.
We only started using PCMark 7 very recently so we don't have a fully updated list of results yet. According to our limited testing however, the results from the Crucial drive shows competitive overall performance.
SiSoft Sandra is a benchmark tool that we use fairly regularly, it is a good all round synthetic software suite. Today we are obviously concentrating on the drive sections to ascertain the S511 and Vertex 3 performance levels.
Close results, scoring well in the Physical Disk test at 492.17 MB/s and falling down a little in the File Systems test … around 70 MB/s less than the leading OCZ Vertex 3 and ADATA S511 drives.
It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.
Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.
The time recorded was 1 second slower than the Corsair Force 3 and OCZ Agility 3 drives. Still a very strong result overall and faster than Intel's 510 120gb SSD.
Again, slightly faster than Intel's 510 120gb drive, but a couple of seconds slower than the OCZ Agility 3 and Corsair Force 3.
We have always liked Crucial products, their Ballistix memory for instance was a firm favourite of ours for a long time, finding its way into our review systems on many occasions. Their build quality and warranty terms have always been at the top of their field – when you buy a Crucial product, you know it is a quality item.
For the last couple of weeks we have been concentrating on the new Sandforce powered solid state drives, so it was refreshing to review the Marvell controlled Crucial M4 256GB today. While the M4 256GB is clearly ahead of the previous generation C300 drives, it is fair to say that it has a tough time competing against the latest Sandforce 2281 powered solid state drives. Overall performance is lower, and when compressed data can be utilised, the M4 is markedly slower. This is a similar situation that the Intel SSD 510 faces.
The market right now is fairly one sided, because SandForce products are dominating the performance charts. The 2281 controller is clearly superior to the Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2.
Pricing right now however is very competitive, as the 256GB M4 can be bought directly from Crucial for £370 inc vat. If Crucial could drop this by another £20, it would make the deal that little bit sweeter, especially when the strong five year warranty is factored into the overall purchase cost.
Pros:
- great performance
- works equally well with incompressible and compressible data
Cons:
- the latest Sandforce controller is faster
KitGuru says: A very capable solid state drive, but it faces some very stiff competition from Sandforce 2281.
