Crucial RealSSD M4 128GB Solid State Drive Review

The drive is typical 2.5″ form factor and is made up from a grey metal casing with a sticker in the middle that follows on with the ambient, professional styling that we saw on the box. There are also four mounting holes depending on how you are going to be installing the drive, and whether it will be in a desktop PC or laptop.

Flipping the drive over, we find the same grey metal styling with another sticker in the middle. This sticker, unlike the front one has relevant information on the drives size and speed, firmware revision and part/serial numbers. It is worth noting the firmware revision is 0009 which shows that Crucial are very keen to keep their products up to date and to stay on top of any problems that may arise over time.

If your particular device is being installed into a Desktop PC or certain style laptop, you may require some form of an adapter, and with them being manufactured to an industry standard fitting, the mounting points are spaced out in the right locations on the side of the drive.

Much like the mounting points, you’ll find the SATA data and power connectors positioned in the correct place so that the drive can be used in all systems that follow the same design and layout.

Ripping the drive to part by unscrewing four corner screws, we find the PCB featuring a Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2 controller which is said to improve the write IOPS, offer faster transfer rates and also include support for 25nm MLC NAND flash from Micron of which we find eight on this side. The same controller is used in lots of other drives on the market, and is a big improvement on the older BJP2 controller that Marvell used to offer.

Turning the PCB over, we find another eight Micron 25nm MLC NAND flash chips and also a 128MB cache buffer which is also manufactured by Micron.