Crucial Releases New (20% Faster) m4 SSD Firmware
Crucial's new firmware update provides a "free" performance increase for its m4 Series.
Crucial has issued a firmware update for its m4 series of SSDs and promises a range of performance improvements beyond your normal firmware fixes. The company is claiming up to a 20 percent performance increase in sequential read speeds. It is like "having your cake and eating it too" - You get those little firmware bugs fixed and you get a nice performance increase for free.
SSDs rely heavily on their firmware for their performance, along with controller-related features such as Garbage Collection, Wear-leveling, to name a couple. Other improvements in the firmware upgrade includes; increased throughput performance, lower write latency, improved chipset compatibility, improvement for cold boot failures, and faster boot up time. The firmware comes through an ISO image that is installed through a CD or DVD. (This is one area I would've like to see Crucial take a page from OCZ and provide its firmware updates from a "Crucial Toolbox".)
Crucial's Official Release Notes:
“Release Date: 08/25/2011
Change Log:
- Changes made in version 0002 (m4 can be updated to revision 0009 directly from either revision 0001 or 0002)
- Improved throughput performance.
- Increase in PCMark Vantage benchmark score, resulting in improved user experience in most operating systems.
- Improved write latency for better performance under heavy write workloads.
- Faster boot up times.
- Improved compatibility with latest chipsets.
- Compensation for SATA speed negotiation issues between some SATA-II chipsets and the SATA-III device.
- Improvement for intermittent failures in cold boot up related to some specific host systems.”

Why not? Anything outa Apple's labs/factory comes with free magic dust.
i don't wanna sound rude, but OCZ reliability has plummeted, that's why they've become cheaper. look at the newegg reviews, there are many complaints of their SSD's failing after 7 or so months. that doesn;t so too great. crucial on the other hand seems to be rolling out with great products... i might pick up the 64gb m4 for OS =]
Why not? Anything outa Apple's labs/factory comes with free magic dust.
or intel
Probably. The dollar sign always goes before the number. The cents symbol goes at the end.....
Maybe on Marvell controller too, just to compare.
Anyone?
From Tom's Aug. SSD review:
"There's no debating whether SSDs offer blistering performance. That that doesn't really matter if you can't trust the device holding that important information. When you read about Corsair's Force 3 recall, OCZ's firmware updates to prevent BSODs, Crucial's link power management issues, and Intel's SSD 320 that loses capacity after a power failure, all within a two-month period, you have to acknowledge that we're dealing with a technology that's simply a lot newer (and consequently less mature) than mechanical storage."
i had the c300 256gig for more than a year now and i love this this thing
crucial ftw!