Gadgetory

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 gonna cost you for a performance drive like an m4 in the neighborhood of 500 to 600 dollars whereas now we're getting down to that sort of 300 ish range although for anyone watching this video in any sort of period of time from now my numbers are gonna be completely irrelevant which by the way is why I don't give you guys pricing when I'm doing videos or as 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 it was a horror Frick of hor horrible and horrific and terrible oversight on my part because crucial actually make some of the most reliable SSDs on the market and in terms of their overall responsibilities 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 ok a there was an issue but they fixed it really quickly that caused it to to stop working after a certain number of time on 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 m4 s you know who would I possibly be you know talking about their an m4 s 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 from something like a genuine drive that did never bought 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 they treat them all as customers they all pay for the drive so anyway there that's my whole spiel on crucial and like I said these are some of the most reliable drives that we carry at NCIX we do have the numbers and they are there's no real debate to be had about it this is a SATA 3 6 gigabit per second drive which isn't actually the most important spec because while that is a factor for the sequential reads and writes what it actually comes down to with SSD performance is the random performance so that is what it's doing something how quickly can it do something else than something else than something else in something else all at the same time and they m4 does admirably well on 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 Marvell controller and it uses micron and 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 in sign of the end users product that they eventually receive so like I said I haven't done the performance evaluation yet so that's gonna be coming on my NCIX comm channel this is mostly just an unboxing and 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 two and a half inch drive oh that's kind of neat check this out oh they don't really let you do it well that's too bad look at this because it's got the spacer in it like some of the old Intel drives did but it looks like they they void the warranty if you take out the screws remove the spacer and try to install it in one of the notebooks that said that's more low profile that's kind of disappointing see because 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 a standard to standard two-and-a-half inch drives you got your mounting holes on the bottom you've got your mounting holes on the side and this is really weird their retail labels on the bottom of the drive you can tell from the state of three six gigabit per second connector as well as the SATA power cable bizarre right that's actually at 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 Linus tech tips as well as NCI XCOM 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