System Overview & Testing Procedures
The drive is advertised as a 256GB drive, but once formatted you have 238GB of usable storage space.
Opening up CrystalDiskInfo we can see all of the information about the drive. As you can see it supports S.M.A.R.T., NCQ and most importantly TRIM.
For testing the drive we will be using the following benchmarking programs, we have provided links to each so you can run the benchmarks as well.
– HDTune Pro (download)
– Sandra Physical Disks Benchmark (download)
– ATTO Disk Benchmark (download)
– CrystalDiskMark 64bit (download)
– AS SSD Benchmark (download)
– Anvil Storage Utility Professional (download)
We also made these optimization changes…
– No power saving options in the BIOS
– ACHI enabled in the BIOS
– Windows 7 User Account Control (UAC) is disabled
– Windows 7 power saving settings are disabled
For comparison we will be testing the Crucial M4 drive against these other solid state drives.
Samsung 830 120GB (Review)
Patriot Pyro SE 120GB (Review)
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G (Review)
Kingston HyperX 240GB (Review)
Patriot Wildfire 120GB (Review)
Corsair Force GT 120GB (Review)
OCZ Agility 3 240GB (Review)
OCZ Vertex 3 120GB (Review)
Now let’s get to testing!
