In early June, the first reports surfaced that suggested Crucial had plans to launch a cheaper v4 series of SSDs. Only just now has the manufacturer officially announced this new line of solid state drives. The Crucial v4 is based on a SATA 3 Gbps controller, which limits the drive's performance to 230 MB/s for reading and 190 MB/s for writing operations on the 256 GB top model. As is expected, the models with a lower capacity, respectively 128, 64 and 32 GB, reach lower speeds.
While the drive won't perform as well in synthetic benchmarks, the actual difference between the v4 SSD and a faster SATA 6 Gbps model with either an LSI-SandForce, Marvel or Samsung controller, remains to be seen. The advantages of solid-state storage aren't just their performance, but also their incredibly fast access times, low power consumption and silent operation. Users with a SATA 3 Gbps computer won't have to pay for performance they can't even use, Rob Wheadon from Crucial says.
The v4 SSDs use modern MLC memory chips and have 3 years of factory warranty. It's likely that TRIM is part of the feature set, in addition to wear-leveling technology and garbage collection. The performance of these new v4 SSDs is outlined below. The drives are compatible with both Windows and Mac systems. There will also be 'desktop' and 'laptop' kits available, bundled with respectively a 3.5" to 2.5" bracket and an external drive case with USB connector.
| Capacity | Max. reading speed |
Max. writing speed |
IOPS reading | IOPS writing | Recommended price |
| 32 GB | 200 MB/s | 60 MB/s | 10.000 | 1.200 | $49.99 (£32) |
| 64 GB | 230 MB/s | 100 MB/s | 2.400 | $69.99 (£45) | |
| 128 GB | 230 MB/s | 175 MB/s | 4.000 | $99.99 (£64) | |
| 256 GB | 230 MB/s | 190 MB/s | 4.000 | $189.99 (£121) |
