Small mSATA SSD drives slowly become more and more popular since, due to their tiny size, they are ideal for use in ultra-portable notebooks and on motherboards. Gigabyte has a long list of motherboards with mSATA slots which initially were meant only to be used as a caching solution with small SSDs installed; as NAND flash prices dwindle however, it quickly became possible for mSATA drives to replace even the main drives of either desktop PCs and or ultra-portable notebooks. Today we are having a look at such an mSATA device, the Crucial m4 256GB drive, which has the full potential to become the primary disk of either ultra-portable notebook or desktop systems with an available mSATA port.
Small mSATA SSD drives slowly become more and more popular since, due to their tiny size, they are ideal for use in ultra-portable notebooks and on motherboards. Gigabyte has a long list of motherboards with mSATA slots which initially were meant only to be used as a caching solution with small SSDs installed; as NAND flash prices dwindle however, it quickly became possible for mSATA drives to replace even the main drives of either desktop PCs and or ultra-portable notebooks. Today we are having a look at such an mSATA device, the Crucial m4 256GB drive, which has the full potential to become the primary disk of either ultra-portable notebook or desktop systems with an available mSATA port.
Manufacturer features and specifications
|
Capacity (Unformatted) |
256GB |
|
Memory Type |
Micron MLC NAND Flash memory |
|
Form Factor |
mSATA |
|
Interface |
SATA 6Gb/s (SATA III) |
|
Controller |
Marvell with Micron Custom Firmware |
|
Sequential Read |
500MB/s |
|
Sequential Write |
260MB/s |
|
4KB Random Read |
45,000 IOPS |
|
4KB Random Write |
50,000 IOPS |
|
MTBF |
1.2 million hours |
|
Endurance |
72TB Total Bytes Written (TBW), equal to 40GB per day for 5 years |
|
Compliance |
RoHS, CE, FCC, UL, BSMI, C-TICK, KCC RRL, W.E.E.E., TUV, VCCI, IC |
