Crucial M4 SSD Firmware Update (0009) Boosts Performance

PCMark 7 & Real World Comparisions

PCMark 7 doesn’t always show large variations in performance but can be a good indicator if there are very strong or weak components to a drive’s overall performance.

Crucial M4 Firmware Revision 0001

Benchmark Results: The overall benchmark score jumped some 4,000 points although the individual scores don’t show a ton of improvement. In fairness, it takes a lot for this benchmark to really show large variances in scores.

Crucial M4 Firmware Revision 0009

Real World Tests

You know the drill on this one. Using a free application called Teracopy, we copied large numbers of two file types from one folder to another on the same drive. Teracopy allows us to objectively measure the time of transfer and using the same drive prevents other devices from tainting the outcome. The first set of files is a 5GB collection of JPG’s of variable size and compression levels with a few movie (.MOV) files thrown in for good measure since most cameras now take video as well as stills.

We also did our usual application install timed test using Adobe Dreamweaver CS5, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional and Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage (v1.102.1901) with all install settings at default. All were installed from an installer located on the target drive itself as installing from another drive, especially an optical drive, would cause a bottle-neck that would corrupt the results. The timing for these is done via stopwatch so there should be about a half second +/- error margin.

Benchmark Results: The app installs rarely show large variances unless there is a marked difference in performance so their times were more or less the same as before. However, the file copy times showed significant improvement.