It's long been suggested that solid state drives represent the most important upgrade you tin requite a modern computer for boosting its overall performance. Today that remains truthful by a considerable margin, where even upkeep-oriented SSDs wipe the flooring with the fastest 3.5" hard drives, providing users with nigh instantaneous admission times compared to the 10ms-plus delay associated with faster 7200RPM HDDs.

Not only are SSDs faster than HDDs, but they likewise consume less power and generate less heat. Additionally, because they have no moving parts, they're quieter, more reliable and more meaty than their spinning counterparts. These "bonus" attributes don't affair much to desktop users, merely they're particularly advantageous to notebooks, which are increasingly outfitted with flash storage instead (or alongside) of sluggish HDDs.

Recognizing that demand, the Serial ATA International Organization standardized a new compact "mSATA" form factor in September 2009, letting manufacturers produce tiny 1.8" drives for ultrabooks and other such mobile systems. Despite the many advantages of SSDs, until recently, they were a costly option with a limited storage capacity, especially those of the mSATA course factor, which accept typically been 128GB or smaller.

Therefore, we took detect when Crucial appear its m4 mSATA SSD in a 256GB capacity at nether $1/GB. The mSATA drive is tiny compared to Crucial's standard 2.5" m4, and despite the size difference, both 256GB models characteristic the same read and write speeds of 500MB/s and 260MB/south -- an heady prospect, indeed. Bold there are no catches, Crucial's new mSATA offering could become the go-to solution for ultraportable upgrades...

Crucial m4 mSATA in Detail

Like the 2.5" m4, the mSATA version uses the Marvell 88SS9174 controller along with a large Micron 256MB cache to improve small write performance. Given that the Marvell 88SS9174 controller measures 17mm ten 17mm alone, plumbing fixtures it on a 30mm-wide PCB along with the 256MB cache and 256GB worth of NAND flash retention is an impressive achievement.

Crucial says its m4 serial has a MTBF (Mean Time Betwixt Failures) of one.2 million hours, which is somewhat more conservative of an guess than the ~1.v million hours you'll notice on nearly other SSDs. To back-trail the usual MTBF figure, Crucial also provides a bulldoze endurance rating for each model.

As mentioned, Crucial claims the m4 mSATA 256GB tin accomplish a read and write throughput of 500MB/south and 260MB/s, identical to the larger 2.5" model. The input/outputs per 2nd (IOPS) rating is also the same, reaching 45,000 IOPS for 4K random read and 50,000 IOPS for 4K random write.

The 64GB m4 mSATA is supposedly good for 36TB of data, while the larger models accept a rating of 72TB. That might not sound too impressive, just 72TB breaks downwardly to an boilerplate of 40GB per twenty-four hour period for five years, which is quite a bit for standard utilize. Too, the m4 mSATA will be ancient history in v years anyway.

In terms of concrete immovability, Crucial claims that the m4 mSATA offers a shock resistance of 1500G and that'due south pretty typical amid competing flash products. The company's new drives tin can also operate reliably at temperatures of up to 70 degrees Celsius and will survive 85 degrees when not-operational.

Similar all SSDs, the m4 mSATA cites very low power consumption figures. At idle, all models use less than 100mW. When active, the 64GB and 128GB versions consume just 150mW, while the 256GB model has a rating of 160mW, which is still uncommonly depression.

The m4 mSATA series measures 50.8 x 29.85 x iii.75mm and weighs 0.three ounces (10 grams). The drives are uniform with both laptops and desktops, though you lot'll need an mSATA to SATA Adapter if you program to install in a desktop that doesn't back up an mSATA connector on the motherboard. They'll also work in RAID if you buy more than one.