welcome to my unboxing of the crucial M4 SSD right now is a time when SSD pricing
is actually coming down in a fairly significant way and what that means is
that all of a sudden larger capacity drives are becoming more attainable it
wasn't that long ago that a 256 gig Drive was going to cost you for a
performance drive like an M4 in the neighborhood of $500 to $600 whereas now
we're getting down to that sort of 300ish range although for anyone
watching this video in any sort of period of time from now my numbers are
going to be completely irrelevant which by the way is why I don't give you guys
pricing when I'm doing videos um or was
I going with that right so higher capacity drives are becoming far more
relevant so what that means is I'm actually planning a high capacity that
is a 256 gig SSD Roundup so in order to
do that I will need to open up and do some testing on a crucial M4 256 gig so
crucial is actually a company that I haven't looked at in terms of ssds on
this channel before and the reason for that is honestly it was uh it was a
horri horrible and horrific and terrible
oversight on my part because crucial actually makes some of the most reliable
ssds on the market and in terms of their overall responsibility as a company and
this seems like sort of a weird thing for me to comment on but they really
impressed me with this particular product because with the original
firmware there was okay ather was an issue but they fixed it really quickly
that caused it to uh to stop working after a certain number of time on uh
hours and they fixed it within like a weekend which is amazing and then
there's the fact that in the original Shipping firmware it had a certain performance level that was pretty good
and the drive was selling really well and it was reliable crucial turned
around and instead of tweaking the firmware and releasing like an m4s you
know who who would I possibly be you know talking about there an m4s they
just release it as a free firmware update for everyone who owns a crucial
M4 already and it dramatically improved the performance of the existing product
for every customer who buys it now and every customer who bought it in the past
so they're not withholding features Intel uh from something like a gen one
drive that did never got trim support in spite of the fact that it could have
been added they're just adding everything to their drives right as soon
as they can and treating all of their customers with the same sort of well
treat treat them all as customers they all paid for the drive so anyway there
that's my whole Spiel on crucial um and like I said these are some of the most
reliable drives that we carry at NC we do have the numbers and they are there's
no real debate to be had about it this is a SATA 3 6 gbit per second Drive
which isn't actually the most important spec because while that is a factor for
the sequential reads and wrs what it actually comes down to with SSD
performance is the random performance so that is when it's doing something how
quickly can it do something else and something else and something else and something else all at the same time and
the M4 does admirably well in that it's not the highest performance drive but it
is a high performance drive it comes in at a reasonable price and it's very very
reliable plus the company stands behind it so there's not really much more that
you can ask for from a drive it uses a Marvel controller and it uses Micron
nand if you guys don't know this crucial is sort of the retail ARM of Micron
which is a much larger company so they actually manufacture The Flash that goes
into the drive so like Intel they're one of the few
Drive manufacturers that is actually producing most of the products inside of
the end users product that they eventually receive so like I said I
haven't done the performance evaluation yet so that's going to be coming on my
ncixcom channel this is mostly just an unboxing and uh sort of my Spiel on
sorry for not doing anything on crucial before and why I think it's awesome now
and this is a 2 and 1 12 inch Drive oh that's kind of neat check this out
oh they don't really let you do it oh that's too bad look at this cuz it's got
the spacer in it like some of the old Intel drives did but it looks like they
uh they Avid the warranty if you take out the screws remove the spacer and try
to install it in one of the notebooks that's uh that's more low profile that's
kind of disappointing see cuz this piece of metal this piece of plastic could be
removed completely and the piece of metal would sit exactly flush with that
although that's very very rare most notebooks except the standard the
standard 2 and 1/2 in dri you got your mounting holes on the bottom you've got
your mounting holes on the side and this is really weird they're retail labels on
the bottom of the drive you can tell from the SATA 3 6 GB per second connector as well as the SATA power
cable bizarre right that's actually the top of the drive where you can see the
firmware revision is clearly marked as well as the capacity and the type of SSD
you have so thank you for checking out my unboxing and don't forget to subscribe to lius techtips as well as
ncixcom my other channel for more reviews unboxings and other computer
videos like this one and other more different ones that are not like this one