Unboxing the Crucial M4 mSATA 256GB Solid State Drive

Mini-SATA or mSATA as most people call it was announced towards the end of 2009. It has primarily been used in laptops and netbooks where a very small solid state drive has been needed. Recently with Intel Z77 chipset we have seen many mSATA ports show up on motherboards. Today we get our first look at an mSATA solid state drive, and man is it small! The drive in question today is the Crucial M4 mSATA 256GB drive. Read on to check out our unboxing and overview video!

Product Link: Click Here
Provided By: Crucial
Information: The Crucial m4 mSATA SSD delivers all of the award-winning performance and reliability of the Crucial m4 SSD – in a drive that’s an eighth of the size. Measuring in at about one-third the size of a standard business card (3cm x 5cm), the Crucial m4 mSATA is designed primarily for ultrathin laptop users who want to dramatically increase their system’s performance. Featuring the same advanced controller technology, Micron custom firmware and high-speed synchronous MLC NAND that have made the Crucial m4 SSD a mainstay on the market, the Crucial m4 mSATA SSD is engineered to deliver the same blazing-fast performance as our award-winning 2.5-inch SSD – in a smaller mSATA form factor.

Ultrathin form factor means flexibility.
Because of its tiny mSATA form factor, the Crucial m4 mSATA SSD can do things that hard drives and other SSDs often can’t. With the Crucial m4 mSATA SSD, save valuable system space by mounting it directly to the mSATA socket on your motherboard – and free up a hard drive bay in the process. Or just keep your existing hard drive and use the Crucial m4 mSATA SSD as a cache to accelerate the system’s performance. Validated for Intel® Smart Response Technology and NVELO Dataplex™ caching software, it’s designed to work as a cache or as a standalone SSD for ultrathin laptops. No matter how you use the Crucial m4 mSATA SSD, experience high-performance storage in a tiny, low-power package.

Consistently fast speeds. No exceptions and no fine print.
There’s a reason that Crucial SSDs have garnered numerous international awards – they do what they’re supposed to do. No matter what kind of files you’re working with on a Crucial SSD, you’ll experience high speeds with no drop in performance.

Unlike other SSDs on the market, Crucial SSDs treat all files the same, regardless of whether they’re compressed or uncompressed. This is important because the files most people use everyday – videos, mp3s, advanced graphics files and zip files – are compressed files and thus unable to be compressed any further. While many SSDs on the market achieve faster speeds by using file compression, many of the most common file types can’t be compressed, resulting in SSDs that often deliver drastically slower speeds than originally advertised. With the advanced technology of a Crucial SSD, however, our advertised speeds are tied to real world use.

Specifications
Capacity (Unformatted): 256GB
Memory Type: Micron MLC NAND Flash memory
Form Factor: mSATA
Interface: SATA 6Gb/s (SATA III)
Controller: Marvell with Micron Custom Firmware
Sequential Read: 500MB/s
Sequential Write: 260MB/s
4KB Random Read: 45,000 IOPS
4KB Random Write: 50,000 IOPS
MTBF: 1.2 million hours
Endurance: 72TB Total Bytes Written (TBW), equal to 40GB per day for 5 years
Compliance: RoHS, CE, FCC, UL, BSMI, C-TICK, KCC RRL, W.E.E.E., TUV, VCCI, IC

About Author