Crucial M4 256GB SSD Review (C400)

Rating: 8.0.

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)

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