14 DAY TRIAL // After what can only be described as a long wait, Crucial has finally made the prices of its m4 solid state disks (also known as the Micron RealSSD C400) official and these closely resemble the cost of the company's previous SSD models while it offers faster sequential transfer speeds.
Right now, Crucial has only announced the pricing of the 128GB, 256GB and 512GB models, and the company will update its price list sometime in the future to also include the 64GB m4 SSD.
According to TechReport, the highest capacity drive will retail for $1,000 US, while the 512GB and 128GB SSDs can be purchased for $500 and $250, respectively.
These prices closely resemble that of the SSDs predecessor, the Crucial RealSSD C300, but the new drives offer better sequential throughput, although this comes at the expense of performance with random I/O operations.
Crucial/Micron's new drives are powered by a Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2 controller (an updated version of the Marvell BKK2 IC found in the C300) as well as 25nm Micron NAND Flash memory chips which are laid out in an 8-channel design.
According to the numbers provided by Crucial, the m4 SSDs can reach sequential read speeds of up to 415 MB/s and their sequential write performance ranges between 95MB/s for the 64GB drive and 260MB/s for the 512GB unit.
The read random 4K performance is estimated at 40,000 IOPS across all the models in the series and the 4K random write ranges between 20,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS.
Earlier in March, the units were listed by an online retailer with prices ranging from $129.99 for the 64GB unit to $929.99 for the 512GB drive, but these went out of stock by now.
Apart from Micron/Crucial, Intel has also developed a drive based on the Marvell 88SS9174 controller, the Intel SSD 510.