 Welcome to my unboxing of the crucial M4 SSD. Right now is a time when SSD pricing is actually coming down in a fairly significant way and what that means is that all of a sudden larger capacity drives are becoming more attainable. It wasn't that long ago that a 256 gig drive was going to cost you for a performance drive like an M4 in the neighborhood of $500 or $600. Whereas now we're getting down to that sort of $300-ish range, although for anyone watching this video in any sort of period of time from now, my numbers are going to be completely irrelevant. Which by the way is why I don't give you guys pricing when I'm doing videos. Where was I going with that? Right. So higher capacity drives are becoming far more relevant. So what that means is I'm actually planning a high capacity, that is a 256 gig SSD roundup. So in order to do that, I will need to open up and do some testing on a crucial M4 256 gig. So crucial is actually a company that I haven't looked at in terms of SSDs on this channel before. And the reason for that is honestly it was a horrible and horrific and terrible oversight on my part because crucial actually makes some of the most reliable SSDs on the market. And in terms of their overall responsibility as a company, and this seems like sort of a weird thing for me to comment on, but they really impressed me with this particular product because with the original firmware there was, okay, A, there was an issue, but they fixed it really quickly that caused it to stop working after a certain number of time on hours and they fixed it within like a weekend, which is amazing. And then there's the fact that in the original shipping firmware it had a certain performance level that was pretty good and the drive was selling really well and it was reliable, crucial turned around and instead of tweaking the firmware and releasing like an M4S, you know, who would I possibly be, you know, talking about there, an M4S, they just release it as a free firmware update for everyone who owns a crucial M4 already and it dramatically improved the performance of the existing product for every customer who buys it now and every customer who bought it in the past. So they're not withholding features from something like a Gen 1 drive that never got trim support in spite of the fact that it could have been added, they're just adding everything to their drives right as soon as they can and treating all of their customers with the same sort of, well, treat them all as customers, they all paid for the drive. So anyway, there, that's my whole spiel on crucial and like I said, these are some of the most reliable drives that we carry at NCIX, we do have the numbers and they are, there's no real debate to be had about it. This is a SATA 3 6 gigabit per second drive which isn't actually the most important spec because while that is a factor for the sequential reads and writes, what it actually comes down to with SSD performance is the random performance. So that is when it's doing something, how quickly can it do something else and something else and something else and something else all at the same time and the M4 does admirably well in that. It's not the highest performance drive but it is a high performance drive, it comes in at a reasonable price and it's very, very reliable plus the company stands behind it. So there's not really much more that you can ask for from a drive. It uses a Marvell controller and it uses Micron NAND, if you guys don't know this, Crucial is sort of the retail arm of Micron which is a much larger company so they actually manufacture the flash that goes into the drive. So like Intel, they're one of the few drive manufacturers that is actually producing most of the products inside of the end user's product that they eventually receive. So like I said, I haven't done the performance evaluation yet so that's going to be coming on my NCIXCOM channel. This is mostly just an unboxing and sort of my spiel on sorry for not doing anything on Crucial before and why I think it's awesome now and this is a 2.5 inch drive. Oh, that's kind of neat, check this out. Oh, they don't really let you do it. Oh, that's too bad. Look at this because it's got the spacer in it like some of the old Intel drives did but it looks like they void the warranty if you take out the screws, remove the spacer and try to install it in one of the notebooks that's more low profile. That's kind of disappointing, see? Because this piece of metal, this piece of plastic could be removed completely and the piece of metal would sit exactly flush with that although that's very, very rare. Most notebooks accept the standard 2.5 inch drives. You've got your mounting holes on the bottom, you've got your mounting holes on the side and this is really weird. They're retail labels on the bottom of the drive. You can tell from the SATA 3 6 gigabit per second connector as well as the SATA power cable. Bizarre, right? That's actually the top of the drive where you can see the firmware revision is clearly marked as well as the capacity and the type of SSD you have. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips as well as NCIXcom, my other channel, for more reviews, unboxings and other computer videos like this one and other more different ones that are not like this one.