Solid State Drives are becoming more and more prevalent. Mainly because of prices dropping as supply increases, but combined with advancements in controller and software technology to offset the reduced write/erase cycles which is modern NAND’s major issue. Crucial has leveraged the venerable Marvell controller into a very durable solid state drive. Marvell was the first S-ATA SSD controller powering the Crucial C300 series drive. The controller itself has not changed much, It still retains the same basic model information, but has been upgraded along with the NAND that it uses, to modern SSD “SATA3” levels.
One thing you never see on Marvell drives is an abnormal drive size it always follows a bit perfect density size (32GB, 63GB, 128GB 256GB 512GB). There is no 370 GB Marvell powered drive, not that the controller is inflexible, just NAND manufacturers do not make 46.25 Gigabit chip. Because the Marvell controller does not require any over provisioning like others might, when you purchase a drive that has eight 64 Gigabit NAND flash modules, you get, a 64GB SSD drive. This is because of the Marvell controller and the DRAM cache used.
If you didn’t get the Adrenaline package and just hooked up the Crucial M4 Adrenaline to your PC as a single SSD, and formatted you would get… 50GB. What the… it is broken RMA it! You would be refused, because this dear reader is a MLC NAND using Marvell controller based Solid State Drive that leverages over provisioning because it is meant to be used as cache device.
A cache drive? Like using an SSD to empower a mechanical drive on the Z68 platform to speed up performance like boot speed and application loading? Yes, but imagine using it on your AMD, Intel or NVidia chipset that does not support SSD caching. Crucial drives might not be among the fastest, especially with lower density drives, but they always do what they always do. There is no worry about TRIM being supported in the drivers, there is no worry that dirty state is going to seriously undermine the performance of the drive. It always performs whether clean or dirty.
Speaking of writes how can an SSD that is so low density, historically its write performance is very poor for large file sizes, be a cache drive? Quite simply, writes don’t change between SSD and HDD. After all if something was written to your SSD and NOT written to your HDD, you would fail to boot when your SSD disappeared. That is not the case with the Crucial M4 Adrenaline, Read speed is what matters most in a cache drive and the adrenaline delivers it in spades. For now, the company, and then the photos!
The Company
Crucial is a consumer arm of a major memory manufacturer, Micron. Other companies might purchase Micron products and even rebadge it as their own, which is why Crucial is not going anywhere. Despite badging, Crucial products use Micron technology. No giant capital i or OCZ symbols on it, it is Micron and is not disputed.
Crucial.com. The Memory Experts.
At Crucial.com, we know memory. We research it. Test it. Stock it. And we’ll even replace it. We’re among the first ones to get a new platform, OS, motherboard, or killer game and we waste no time putting it to the test. We sit in dark rooms reading benchmark scores. We spend hours installing and uninstalling memory modules into motherboard after motherboard… We don’t get tired. We never cut corners. We break our backs to get your upgrade out the door in a flash. And we support our products—and customers—every step of the way.
For their full About Us check out this page.
Lets get onto the Pr0n.
1 Comment
Good article. I’ve been doing some research on SSD caching. On the first page of the article, you mention that the Adrenaline SSD with Dataplex software will work with AMD, Intel or Nvidia chipsets. This is what caught my attention because Nvelo says their Dataplex software does not work with Nvidia storage controllers. As you might have guessed, I have a Nvidia chip set and I’m trying to find a caching solution that has been proven to work. When I chatted with Crucial, they first said it would work and then they said no after I pointed them to the Nvelo limitation with Nvidia. They did say that I could buy it and return it if it didn’t work. Before I do that, I wanted to check if anyone knows for certain that this will work with Nvidia. I appreciate your help.
Thanks!