Crucial m4 128GB mSATA Internal Solid State Drive CT128M4SSD3 Review

 Rating: 4,5 of 5 stars====================Product price: Check new Price in amazon====================Buy with Secure Transaction Amazon now…====================
Product DescriptionThe 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.

Crucial m4 128GB mSATA Internal Solid State Drive CT128M4SSD3

Customer Reviews:* I bought the Crucial M4 mSATA after spending a good deal of time researching various products in the market. I decided to invest in the Crucial M4 series mSATA, owing to its good reputation in the market with regards to its reliability as well as the R/W speeds it offers.During my first attempt at placing the order (@199USD), amazon had issues charging my card. Luckily, when I tried purchasing the item the second time using another card, the price had dropped by 20USD to 179.99USD, which made this a rather sweet deal.Being a prime member, amazon dispatched my shipment citing a '2 day delivery' time frame. However, the shipment was lost while it was in transit, the day it was supposed to be delivered.I contacted the helpful amazon support staff, and they immediately sent a new replacement shipment, which I received the next day.The Crucial 256GB M4 mSATA came with 2 additional screws required to mount it to the motherboard. This was an unexpected surprise as there are tons of complaints by customers on the internet regarding the absence of the same.Anyway, installing the drive was rather straight forward. The steps that I followed are listed here, to make it simple for people installing this on Lenovo Thinkpads:Required: 1) Thinkpad Restore USB or DVDs. 2) Phillips head screwdriver set.1) Disconnect the AC adapter from the laptop, and remove the laptop battery before proceeding.2) Remove the 2 screws (located near the keyboard icon) at the base of the laptop to slide the keyboard off. (One of the screws is located inside the compartment for RAM modules.)3) Remove the placeholder for the WWAN slot and a small screw under it (Factory installed by lenovo). (This screw is the same that Crucial provided with the mSATA SSD, required to secure the drive onto the motherboard)4) Plug the mSATA drive in this WWAN slot, and secure it with the fore mentioned screw.5) Slide the keyboard back in place.6) Remove the back panel that houses the HDD. Then, lift the HDD up and remove it from the system before proceeding with the OS re-installation. (This is a precautionary measure to prevent OS re-installation on the Platter based HDD, as there is no option to select a specific HDD in the system restore menu)7) Plug the laptop battery in and connect the AC adapter.8) Power the laptop ON. Hit 'Enter' as soon as the lenovo logo appears to interrupt the boot process.9) Select the option to enter BIOS by pressing F1.10) Change the boot order and move SSD to the top, followed by the HDDs, Optical Drives etc.11) Save changes and reboot.12) Insert the USB restore Key as soon as the laptop shuts down after saving BIOS changes. Follow Step 8 again, and then select the system restore option this time.13) Follow the instructions, and the system should be ready to use in about 7-8 minutes.14) Once everything is installed and the system is in a usable state, power the laptop off to plug the Platter based HDD back in place.That is it. Your laptop should be booting off the mSATA drive while recognizing the platter based HDD, which you could later use for storing data.There isn't much to say about the performance of this specific mSATA drive that hasn't already been said, over and over again.Even on the SATA2 interface on my Thinkpad W530, this drive offers excellent performance and completely saturates the available bandwidth (which is very close to the R/W capability of this drive anyway).In short, this is a very good investment and the best possible upgrade for your laptop. It'll undoubtedly remove the bottleneck that the conventional platter based HDDs present on modern PCs.I hope Thinkpad owners looking for a good mSata solution find this post useful.* Satisfied with the performance of this SSD. Under a dollar per gigabyte and good speeds, making it a worthwhile upgrade if you have a motherboard that accepts mSATA or a laptop or other device that has removeable onboard mSATA storage. Very happy that this is SATA 3.I'm seeing read speeds of 400MB/s, write speeds of about 140MB/s, and very quick access times. Speeds are about on par with older 2.5" OCZ Vertex 3 and older Intel X25 SSD drives that I have used in the past (and am still satisfied with). From the cursory check that I did on other mSATA manufacturers, this appears to have the highest speeds / dollar in the mSATA form factor.I feel good about the reliability of this SSD as Crucial manufactures their own SSDs (Crucial is a brand of Micron Technologies) and offers a good warranty. The large SSD manufacturers are Micron/Crucial, Intel, Hynix, Samsung, and Sandisk. Any other brands, such as Corsair or OCZ, source their parts from aforementioned manufacturers. Micron was one of the first to release SSDs that used the new 6 Gb/s SATA III standards, so I feel confident about their technology's reliability.