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welcome to my unboxing of the crucial M4 SSD right now is a time when SSD pricing

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is actually coming down in a fairly significant way and what that means is

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that all of a sudden larger capacity drives are becoming more attainable it

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wasn't that long ago that a 256 gig Drive was going to cost you for a

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performance drive like an M4 in the neighborhood of $500 to $600 whereas now

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we're getting down to that sort of 300ish range although for anyone

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watching this video in any sort of period of time from now my numbers are

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going to be completely irrelevant which by the way is why I don't give you guys

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pricing when I'm doing videos um or was

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I going with that right so higher capacity drives are becoming far more

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relevant so what that means is I'm actually planning a high capacity that

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is a 256 gig SSD Roundup so in order to

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do that I will need to open up and do some testing on a crucial M4 256 gig so

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crucial is actually a company that I haven't looked at in terms of ssds on

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this channel before and the reason for that is honestly it was uh it was a

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horri horrible and horrific and terrible

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oversight on my part because crucial actually makes some of the most reliable

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ssds on the market and in terms of their overall responsibility as a company and

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this seems like sort of a weird thing for me to comment on but they really

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impressed me with this particular product because with the original

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firmware there was okay ather was an issue but they fixed it really quickly

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that caused it to uh to stop working after a certain number of time on uh

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hours and they fixed it within like a weekend which is amazing and then

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there's the fact that in the original Shipping firmware it had a certain performance level that was pretty good

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and the drive was selling really well and it was reliable crucial turned

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around and instead of tweaking the firmware and releasing like an m4s you

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know who who would I possibly be you know talking about there an m4s they

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just release it as a free firmware update for everyone who owns a crucial

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M4 already and it dramatically improved the performance of the existing product

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for every customer who buys it now and every customer who bought it in the past

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so they're not withholding features Intel uh from something like a gen one

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drive that did never got trim support in spite of the fact that it could have

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been added they're just adding everything to their drives right as soon

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as they can and treating all of their customers with the same sort of well

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treat treat them all as customers they all paid for the drive so anyway there

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that's my whole Spiel on crucial um and like I said these are some of the most

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reliable drives that we carry at NC we do have the numbers and they are there's

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no real debate to be had about it this is a SATA 3 6 gbit per second Drive

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which isn't actually the most important spec because while that is a factor for

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the sequential reads and wrs what it actually comes down to with SSD

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performance is the random performance so that is when it's doing something how

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quickly can it do something else and something else and something else and something else all at the same time and

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the M4 does admirably well in that it's not the highest performance drive but it

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is a high performance drive it comes in at a reasonable price and it's very very

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reliable plus the company stands behind it so there's not really much more that

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you can ask for from a drive it uses a Marvel controller and it uses Micron

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nand if you guys don't know this crucial is sort of the retail ARM of Micron

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which is a much larger company so they actually manufacture The Flash that goes

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into the drive so like Intel they're one of the few

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Drive manufacturers that is actually producing most of the products inside of

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the end users product that they eventually receive so like I said I

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haven't done the performance evaluation yet so that's going to be coming on my

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ncixcom channel this is mostly just an unboxing and uh sort of my Spiel on

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sorry for not doing anything on crucial before and why I think it's awesome now

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and this is a 2 and 1 12 inch Drive oh that's kind of neat check this out

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oh they don't really let you do it oh that's too bad look at this cuz it's got

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the spacer in it like some of the old Intel drives did but it looks like they

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uh they Avid the warranty if you take out the screws remove the spacer and try

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to install it in one of the notebooks that's uh that's more low profile that's

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kind of disappointing see cuz this piece of metal this piece of plastic could be

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removed completely and the piece of metal would sit exactly flush with that

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although that's very very rare most notebooks except the standard the

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standard 2 and 1/2 in dri you got your mounting holes on the bottom you've got

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your mounting holes on the side and this is really weird they're retail labels on

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the bottom of the drive you can tell from the SATA 3 6 GB per second connector as well as the SATA power

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cable bizarre right that's actually the top of the drive where you can see the

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firmware revision is clearly marked as well as the capacity and the type of SSD

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you have so thank you for checking out my unboxing and don't forget to subscribe to lius techtips as well as

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ncixcom my other channel for more reviews unboxings and other computer

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videos like this one and other more different ones that are not like this one