14 DAY TRIAL // One would think that a purposely thin storage unit would not get to have too great a capacity, but Crucial subverted these expectations with the m4 SSD series.
Crucial has just sent out an announcement about its latest series of solid state drives.
Given all the hype raised for Ultrabooks, one may be able to guess what the new drives are about.
Sure enough, Crucial put a lot of stock in size when it made the latest m4 series.
The result of its ministrations was a collection of drives that measure just 7mm in thickness (0.27 inches).
The company made a point of mentioning that the performance was not adversely affected (it is the same as on the 9.5mm m4 SSDs).
What is arguably even more intriguing is Crucial's success in sticking to a very ambitious capacity scheme as well.
While 64 GB and 128 GB are considerable on their own, they can't measure up to the 256 GB and, most importantly, the 512 GB model.
512GB is actually one of the highest that consumer solid state drives can reach today, and that goes for desktop units as much as for notebook drives.
“The demand for thinner, lighter, and lower-cost laptops continues to grow, and many users are demanding reliable storage solutions that offer high performance in these increasingly smaller form factors,” said Robert Wheadon, worldwide senior product manager, Crucial.
“The 7mm Crucial m4 SSD provides exceptional performance in a super-thin form factor, is extensively tested in-house, and is the newest offering in our award-winning SSD portfolio.”
Unlike all the companies waiting for CES 2012 (Consumer Electronics Show), Crucial is not going to hold off on the newcomers.
It claims to have already started shipping them, at prices of £75.99/$117/92 Euro (for 64GB), £133.99/$207/162 Euro (128GB), £262.99/$406/318 Euro (256GB) and £508.99/$787/616 Euro (512GB).
The sums are steep but still lower than they would have been before the steady SSD price drop of the past year.