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Crucial RealSSD M4 C400 256GB SATA600

The RealSSD C400 represents a mild performance gain over last year's C300 during light workloads, it's handily dispatched by competing drives from OCZ and Intel when it comes to heavy multitasking, but that's okay if the C400's price reflects its inferior performance and it does -- there's nothing wrong with delivering an entry-level product.

Based on 26 reviews

Excellent:

15
Good:

7
Average:

3
Bad:

1

Pros

Exceptional speed, Does not rely on realtime file compression to achieve highest levels of performance, 3 year warranty, Available in up to 512GB capacities.
SATA 6Gbps, $40 cheaper than similarly performance SSDs, Good price to performance ratio, 3 year warranty
The Crucial m4 solid-sate drive (SSD) is competitively priced and offers fast performance. The drive supports SATA 6Gbps and works in any SATA-based storage applications.
Good performance. Supports 6Gbps SATA III.
Up to 10% faster than Sandforce drives, Supports TRIM, 3 year warranty, Nice looking, rugged metal case
Great randomaccess speeds; 400MB/s reads, 250MB/s writes.

Cons

Not as fast as SandForce drives
The m4's performance could be better comparatively, and it doesn't come with a drive-bay converter to work with desktop computers.
Expensive. Outperformed in most tests by competing SSDs. Slow garbage collection demands TRIM support in OS.
Higher price than C300, No significant performance update over C300
Not the fastest.

By TechSpot on May 27, 2011

So, have we seen a repeat performance of the RealSSD C300's grand entrance? Not really. Although we found the m4 to be considerably faster in our file transfer tests as Crucial fine-tuned top end sequential performance, that had little impact on our...

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By hardCOREware on May 08, 2012

s I really liked the 128GB Crucial m4 when I first looked at it months ago. That was before the performance was significantly boosted by firmware upgrades, and without the benefit of a full stack of flash channels to utilize. Now we are looking at the...

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By ThinkComputers on April 22, 2012

Crucial is a name we always know for reliability and quality-made products and the M4 drive is no exception. It is very well made and besides the controller everything else inside is made by Crucial (Micron). Crucial does offer their standard 3 year...

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By AnandTech on April 10, 2012

The arrival of affordable, high-performance client SSDs gave us two (closely related) things: 1) a high-speed primary storage option that could work in both a notebook or a desktop, and 2) independence from traditional hard drive form factors....

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By X-bit Labs on March 14, 2012

It is really hard to find any problems with Marvell 88SS9174 controller, which is used in the solid state drives reviewed today. Its characteristics and internal architecture allow designing SSDs with up-to-date performance, and such SSD makers as...

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By Rbmods.com on March 04, 2012

There are more SSD disks on the market; for example: OCZ, Corsair, and a few others. Both Kingston and Crucial are big sellers though and perform very well in most tests. The Patriot drive in this test was older but managed to keep up very well with...

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By Tom's Hardware UK on February 28, 2012

After Valentine's Day, SSDs prices fell yet again, and we updated our list to reflect those changes. This month, the best deals are found in the mid-range offering, and there's one bargain in our list for a 240GB SSD that you simply will not...

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By StorageReview on February 01, 2012

Performance of the Crucial m4 SSD when paired up in RAID0 was impressive, especially in areas with heavy read activity. In straight line performance the m4 in RAID0 measured 878MB/s read and 524MB/s write, more than doubling the previous write...

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By Legion Hardware on January 19, 2012

The great thing about revisiting the Crucial m4 is that we now have a great deal of experience with these drives. When I first looked at the m4 back in May of 2011 some 9 months ago a lot was unknown about the product, most importantly reliability. It...

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By Guru of 3D on December 21, 2011

The year 2011 was quite complex in SSD matters. The industry finally made a move towards SATA3 (6 Gbps) and with that arrived a lot of new controllers and thus SSDs. Earlier in the year the most promising SSDs where based on SandForce 2281...

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