Crucial V4 256GB SATA II SSD Review

CrystalDiskMark and PCMark 7

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 x64 – Intel P67 Platform

Benchmark Results: A little bit better here for the Crucial V4 as the sequential reads and writes are back up near where we saw them on the ATTO benchmark and above the rated specifications of 230MB/s and 190MB/s reads and writes respectively.

PCMark 7 Professional – Intel P67 Platform

We are continuing to use the new PCMark 7 software since they have updated it to version 7 which is specifically designed for Windows 7. It measures the performance of the latest PC hardware across a variety of common scenarios. PCMark Vantage 7 supports both system level and component level benchmarking and comprises several different test suites but for the purposes of this review, we employed the secondary storage suite. The nice thing about it is that you can submit your scores online and compare against others.

Benchmark Results: Predictably, scores are a little lower than the drives in the comparison, especially in the application start test.