Crucial M4 / Micron C400 256GB SSD Review

CrystalDiskMark and PCMark Vantage

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 – Intel P67 Platform

Benchmark Results: The 4k random write scores are very impressive here and the read scores aren’t too shabby, either. Again, it is much improved over the C300 so Crucial has done a nice job of updating the drive while using the same controller. The 25nm NAND doesn’t hurt, either.

PCMark Vantage 1.0.2.0 – Intel P67 Platform

PCMark Vantage v1.01 measures the performance of the latest PC hardware across a variety of common scenarios. PCMark Vantage supports both system level and component level benchmarking and comprises several different test suites but for the purposes of this review, we stuck with just the HDD suite. The nice thing about PCMark Vantage is that you can submit your scores online and compare against others.

Benchmark Results: The m4 really does a bang up job here beating out everything except for the Application Loading benchmark. If you recall, drives in RAID 0 mode for other drives didn’t fare so well on this benchmark suite. The overall score of 63,943 is almost the best we have seen for any drive regardless of configuration.