The Crucial M4 is 128GB solid state drive. These drives use a technology akin to that used in flash drives , and seen in the likes of tablets and smart phones, to provide a slim, cool and fast performing storage device for your system.
I'd be thinking about getting one of these for ages as my 1.5 TB Hard Disk Drive had become extremely slow and no amount of defrags and optimisation could improve it that much. I'd tried an alternative 1TB drive but still had very slow times between turning on, logging in and eventually loading my desktop so I could work.
I was aware that SSD's can greatly improve performance but was concerned that they are know to have a shorter life than HDD's and that they won't slowly degrade like an HDD but just stop working (rather than gradually giving bad sectors as Hard Disks tend to).
I took the plunge though and I'm very glad I did, my boot times have improved from several minutes to under a minute even with my system now fully loaded with all my services and the system is extremely nippy now.
It's worth noting that these drives are 2.5" laptop sized. If you want to install them in a desktop then an adaptor like this allows you to attach them
Akasa AK-HDA-03 2.5-3.5 inch SSD/HDD Adapter
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Installation was easy. I plugged the drive into the adapter bay and easily slotted this into my tower. I then plugged this into a spare sata port (my P55 mother board has sata 2 so I'm testing at a slower rate than those with sata 3 will get and still very impressed). Following that I booted and went into my BIOS set-up to tell the system this was my primary HDD and to set my boot order. Following that I put Windows 7 in my DVD drive, started the boot process and carried out the installation. A frresh install is required rather than copying an image from and old HDD as Windows 7 will optimise itself for an SSD and you always get a better and fresh performance when performing a clean build.
The biggest bottleneck to performance on my system was the HDD, and it will be for a lot of people. The temptation can be to buy a new motherboard or CPU but it's often the case that these may well handle everything you need perfectly fast but are being hamstrung by a slow old mechanical drive. This is an upgrade that can affordably transform a system.
A couple of things worth noting though: These drives have a limited life and tend to be expensive compared to an HDD and they are best used in conjunction with an HDD. What I've done is set this as my systems drive for windows but kept my HDD and used it to hold all of my user libraries and have also installed several programs onto it, plus i've put my steam library on there. That way the majority of dynamic and frequantly changing high volume stuff can sit on the HDD whilst the SSD handles the task of running the OS itself. This should ensure a balance of performance and system life and the system still runs very quickly. This also means this drive is still two thirds empty , thus ensuring plenty of spare capacity and hopefully life.
Knowing the drives are more vulnerable I'd also advise taking regular image backups in case you need to quickly rebuild your system following failure. I've also kept win 7 on my other HDD so that I can always boot from it when I need to.
Overall though I'm very impressd with this drive. A big boost to my system for a reasonable price.
[edit]
After a few months of good performance and no problems I ran into problems with this drive. Googling around I found these problems are very common. The drive can begin to randomly freeze and completely freeze windows. Once this happens you are forced to power reset and will find the drive is missing from your bios.
In order to find your drive again you need a power cycle. To do this, boot the machine into your bios and leave it for 20 minutes, reset the machine and repeat, the drive will then reappear. This has worked for me.
In order to prevent the freezing it is suggested you update your firmware, but this doesn't always work. The following was another suggestion from Crucial themselves:
"The behaviour you are describing is consistent with deleted cells not being cleaned from your drive. This can result in reduced performance or even complete lack of response from the SSD.
There is a feature built into our SSDs called Active Garbage Collection. Letting Active Garbage Collection run on the drive for an extended period will clean these cells and restore the SSD to a healthy state.
To do this on your PC or Laptop, you will need to let the SSD idle for 6 to 8 hours.
In a PC, simply disconnect the SATA cable from your SSD and only leave the power cable connected. After switching your PC on, the SSD will be in an idle state but still have power so Garbage Collection can function. Leave the PC powered for the 6-8 hours.
In a laptop, power on with the SSD installed and enter your system BIOS (please refer to your system manufacturer's documentation on how to access the BIOS.) Leave the laptop in the BIOS menu for the 6-8 hours.
Following this process, your drives functionality and performance should be restored.
To prevent the SSD performance degrading again, you can make adjustments to your power settings:
- Go to Control Panel
- Go to Hardware and Sound
- Go to Power Options
- Select Change Plan Settings
- Select Change Advanced Settings
- Make sure the 'hard disk' field is set to `never' (Laptop users select 'battery and power adapter'). "
Hope this helps if you experience this.
Reviews with images
Nothing short of amazing
I ordered this product express delivery, arrived next day before noon. The usual excellent amazon service.Th product itself, well packaged and simple instructions.I installed into a mac mini (2011 i5 2.3 with 2GB ram).The mac mini performance was really disappointing across the boar using a 5400rpm disk. Shut down and restart took around 2 minutes, when you click a menu, there would always be a slight delay, items like safari would bounce 4-5 times in the dock before loading, photoshop was around 10 bounces, using aperture would take 5-10 seconds to refresh when scrolling through the library (160gb library on local drive).It took 8 minutes from start to finish to remove the old drive and replace with the SSD (going at a steady pace).When I went to turn on and Install mountain lion from USB I was amazed, it took just over 6 minutes to complete a full install of the operating system from scratch! That blew my mind, it usually takes 30 minutes +.Next, I went to install my files from time machine drive. It took 1 hour 5 mins (it took almost 4 hours with the 5400rpm drive). I am certain it would be faster if the drive dishing up the files was faster and not running over USB.I have run the black magic disk tests a couple of times to check the speeds of the drives.5400 rpm driveWrite speed 25MB/sRead speed 35MB/sCrucial M4Write speed 256MB/sRead speed 487MB/sAs you can see, the speeds are well in excess of 10 times faster, when you take into account the fact that "seek" times are almost non existent, it is nothing short of stunning.I am very, very pleased with this, I would recommend to anyone to get an SSD drive as your main system disk. Even if you install a 64gb to run your OS and programs and put all your files on a second or external disk, you will still see amazing performance increases.Extra ram will allow you to do more things and run more programs on your computer, but an SSD will make things just seem much snappier.P.S. My mac mini now runs at around 10w power consumption (according to home power meter) as a result of installing this. It runs dead silent and is cool to the touch, not slightly warm making me think that the longevity of the system has been increased somewhat.I will be getting another for my laptop very soon.
Top reviews from United Kingdom
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Top reviews from other countries
Daniel Coulombe
Much faster than old drive.
Reviewed in Canada on 13 October 2013Style Name: 128GB M4 + Transfer KitVerified Purchase
Jay F. Grissom
Brilliant for an older iMac - Worth every penny.
Reviewed in the United States on 24 April 2013Style Name: 512GB M4 + 3.5" BracketVerified Purchase
Jose
No te lo vas a creer!!!
Reviewed in Spain on 26 January 2014Style Name: 128GB M4Verified Purchase
Tukkie
Very impressive speed for a systems drive
Reviewed in the United States on 31 May 2012Style Name: 256GB M4 + Transfer KitVerified Purchase
