The Crucial m4 mSATA SSD delivers all of the award-winning performance and reliability of the Crucial m4 SSD – in a drive that’s an eighth of the size. Measuring in at about one-third the size of a standard business card (3cm x 5cm), the Crucial m4 mSATA is designed primarily for ultrathin laptop users who want to dramatically increase their system’s performance. Because of its small form factor, the Crucial m4 mSATA SSD can do things that hard drives and other SSDs often can’t: it can serve as a primary storage device in ultrathin laptops, it can attach directly to the mSATA socket on your system’s motherboard (freeing up a hard drive bay), or it can act as a cache to complement the performance of an existing hard drive. Offering lightweight construction, inherent power savings, travel-worthy durability, and validation for Intel Smart Response technology, the Crucial m4 mSATA SSD packs powerful performance in a tiny mSATA form factor.
$ 116.25
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Great Start, Small Hiccup, Overall Good,
I bought the mSATA version of the Crucial M4 mostly for the form factor and have not been disappointed at all. I also bought it for the fact that it’s one of, if not THE only mSATA SSD I know that doesn’t use compression algorithms (a la SandForce). The Marvell controller here works great and Crucial/Micron have done a fantastic job with their firmware. Just as I received it (about 2 weeks ago) they sent notice of an updated firmware that fixed most all extended use failures that people have been getting in the past. I myself have not had a single problem. As I said in the title, it may not max out the synthetic benchmark programs or have the fastest write specifications on paper but it does have one of the best reliability track records out there and it doesn’t use any sort of super over-provisioning or compression to get the job done. It also has one of the most attentive companies backing it and troubleshooting the problems that do arise, so that makes it a true winner in my book. You won’t be disappointed in the performance if you’re upgrading from any standard platter based HDD. Also, if you’re looking for the small form factor and something to plug directly into a desktop motherboard or laptop to save space, it accomplishes that goal for you as well.
For a little background on the hardware, it’s been first used in an ASUS Crosshair III Formula motherboard in a SATA II socket through the Syba adapter. Afterwards I transferred it over to a new build on the Maximus V Gene where it directly plugs into the mPCIE expansion bracket (also SATA II). For those interested, it does also work wonderfully of course in the SATA III sockets on the new build which allows for faster read speeds. I however prefer the convenience of the direct motherboard interface and the fewer cables associated therewith. My perception is that it does not suffer for being attached to a SATA II socket. The response times are just as snappy and Windows 7 still grades it at 7.8 so I’m happy. If you have questions or concerns, feel free to comment and I’ll try to answer as best I can from my own experience.
*******UPDATE ON 28-Oct-2012*******
Well…. two days after the return window to Amazon, the drive decided to fail… No warning, just suddenly a blank screen. Upon reboot, the drive cannot be found. It seems another reviewer here has the same problem with the most recent firmware revision. The drive is no longer listed at all in the BIOS in any mode (IDE or AHCI) after a crash and hard reboot. *SIGH*. I’m just glad I kept my Raptor in it’s original image condition (just a month old is all). Now I have to see how or if Crucial handles the RMA and whatnot. Here’s hoping my faith is not betrayed. 🙁
*******UPDATE ON 31-Oct-2012*******
I visited the Crucial forums after trying the tech support email. I managed to find a “power cycle” reset method to allow the SSD to self correct. It worked and I didn’t have to follow through with an RMA. The drive came back to life without any data loss thankfully and it’s working just as well as it did before! The issue I experienced was with the 01MG firmware revision. It is known to Crucial/Micron and hopefully they are working on a fix. I am glad they do actually support their products and that the community is active in finding fixes. They did respond very quick to the support email I sent as well. My faith in good companies held true! =D
Here are the links to those fixes for anyone who might also have a similar problem. First is the official procedure from Crucial:
forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD-Knowledge/Why-did-my-SSD-quot-disappear-quot-from-my-system/ta-p/65215
Next is the procedure (slightly modified) that I used and worked quite well:
forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/How-I-fixed-my-M4-that-wouldn-t-detect-in-the-BIOS/td-p/110964
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|My first ever 1star review…,
How do you rate a product that works great from a company that doesn’t seem to care?
Do not upgrade your Crucial m4 drive (2.5″ or mSATA) to firmware 010G / 01MG. There is a known issue with the drives not being recognized after a reboot.
There is a path to revert from 010G to 000F for the 2.5″ drive, but not for 01MG to 000F on the mSATA drive.
Here’s hoping that Crucial does something to address this soon.
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|works well with lenovo ideapad y480,
Although this SSD is not listed as one of the compatible SSDs with lenovo ideapad y480 laptop in Crucial’s website, I took the risk and well it definitely works! Although at first I thought of buying an SATA3 SSD for my laptop, I later realized it has a vacant mSATA slot and decided to buy this SSD (an SATA3 SSD would require me to remove my HDD since there is only one drive bay in y480 and now with mSATA SSD, I am using both my HDD and SSD).
The SSD arrived with two screws and it took me like 5 minutes to insert the SSD in the PCIe slot. At first boot, the system did not recognize SSD. I opened Device Manager and looked for hardware changes and it did not recognize again. After that, I rebooted the system again. When I opened the Disk Management (can be clicked from the menu Win+X), the SSD was there. I initialized it using quick NTFS format and default unit size. Since my system was pretty new, I didn’t want to bother myself with installing everything from scratch. I searched the Net and saw ppl talking about how Paragon Migrate OS to SSD software can seamlessly make the transition from HDD to SSD. My system came with Windows 8 and I discovered only the latest version (v3.0) of Paragon Migrate OS to SSD which costs like $20 supports Win 8. I searched for coupons/promotions and found out that today (01/10/13) Paragon Drive Copy 12 Compact which also supports migration of Win 8 to SSD is offered as a freebie to my luck. I quickly read the Help section (it was actually damn straightforward) and migrated my OS to my new SSD. Then, I restarted my computer and entered BIOS settings by pressing F2 at the boot and moved the SSD up as the first booting device . When the OS booted from the SSD, I opened disk management again and reformatted my HDD not to cause any conflicts.
That’s all! Now my computer boots in 6 sec before entering password and 7 sec after entering password. My Microsoft Primary Hard disk index went up from 5.9 to 8.1. In the end, I did a little tweaks like moving the Downloads folder of my Interner browser into HDD and so on. I really suffered from the deficiency of information on the Net about how to migrate Win 8 into SSD effectively and seamlessly. I hope my review has been helpful for the ones trying to do the same thing.
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