Crucial's m4 SSD Tested At 64, 128, 256, And 512 GB

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SSDs are a lot faster than hard drives. But their price tags continue deterring enthusiasts. Less-expensive SSDs are available, but what do you trade off (aside from capacity) when you buy a smaller drive? We test four models from Crucial to find out.

Power Consumption

According to IDC, the vast majority of SSDs sold to consumers are put to use in notebooks. There's obviously a large contingent of desktop users using SSDs to help augment performance. But if you're a notebook owner, there's the added benefit of shock/vibration protection. For many road warriors, SSDs provide more data safety than a hard drive. 

There's also the issue of power consumption to consider, since battery life directly affects the time you're able to spend away from the wall. Although it can be argued that screen brightness, Wi-Fi activity, and processing workloads impact run times more than storage, there's a big enough difference between various SSDs that you really can squeeze out more battery life if you make a careful selection.

Our meter stops working when we hit 5 W and above. That's why we're lacking a score for the 512 GB m4.

You'd expect that the SSDs sporting more memory package and dies per package would use the most power. However, that's not what we see in 4 KB random reads. It seems that there's a threshold where adding more NAND chips to a channel actually lets you to use less power to retrieve information (at least when you hit steady-state performance). That point seems to be at 256 GB with the m4. Once we move up to 512 GB, we're back to using slightly more power.

Andrew Ku
37 Comments Comment from the forums
  • wintermint
    I've been recommending the Crucial m4 128gb to people, and after seeing this.. I'm glad I did :]
    Reply
  • sceen311
    it'd be nice if they threw a 7200 rpm hardrive on the bench... We don't all have laptops ya know.
    Reply
  • compton
    I'm glad this was done. It's rare that you get the chance to stack all the capacity points up (as in never). I bought an Intel 510 120GB and a M4 64GB and my own testing showed that you'd never know the difference besides the capacity (in day to day use, besides lower max write MB/S). I kinda like keeping my system drive to a bare minimum -- just Win7 no swap or hibernate, Office, a few other apps, and then I keep my Steam folder on a separate drive. Simple. I will say that if you are building a new system, cut whatever you have to in order to fit at least a 64GB SSD -- the M4 is excellent at any capacity. I'd rather have to go down to an i3 from a 2500k than from a SSD to a HDD. I get tired of people saying "it's not worth it" and "they're not much faster than a 7200rpm". Those people must be doing it wrong.
    Reply
  • beenthere
    Now if they could only make these SSDs reliable, we could all enjoy some performance improvement. Intel, Micron, OCZ and Corsair to name a few have all had reliability/compatibility/firmware issues of some sort resulting in loss of data, which for me is simply unacceptable.
    Reply
  • Last month I got a 64GB for my laptop and a 128GB m4 for my desktop. So far no issues, and the speed is great. Glad I got the 128GB and not the 256GB.
    Reply
  • PCMark 7 Storage tests are just pathetic, they have messed some of them up on purpose it seems just to shrink the difference between systems containing SSD and the ones containing HDD only, useless bench from start to "finish"...
    Reply
  • ubercake
    These things are still too expensive.
    Reply
  • mroanhaus
    I picked up the 64 GB M4 two weeks ago on Newegg for under $90. I am so glad I bought it, the thing makes boot times lightning fast. I have Win7 64-bit, Photoshop, 3DS Max, Google Chrome, and a few little monitoring and Bitcoin mining apps on there and I STILL have 21 GB to spare. Don't buy the 128 GB unless you really need it, throwing Steam and other massive apps will be much better suited on a secondary HDD. SSDs are simply amazing and well worth the money spent, even if you're a cheapass like me they're still affordable. The time saved from having to wait around while booting your computer makes SSDs worth the money imo
    Reply
  • burnley14
    See how they all hover pretty close to the same price per gigabyte, while sequential write and random write performance trend upward? Those are the spoils available to folks willing to spend more on higher capacities.

    This is true, but in 6 months when the whole lineup is outdated and the next generation of drives blows these ones away, those that spent more are going to have spent the extra money without much purpose.
    Reply
  • cknobman
    burnley14This is true, but in 6 months when the whole lineup is outdated and the next generation of drives blows these ones away, those that spent more are going to have spent the extra money without much purpose.
    Well going by your logic why should anyone ever spend money on anything in technology??? Guess its always a waste huh?

    Failed logic.
    Reply