Lifespan of Crucial M4 128GB mSATA vs SSD

Hey guys,

I am wondering if anyone knows if the life-span of the Crucial M4 128GB SDD is better or worse then its mSATA equivalent.

Thanks,
Josh

 

It depends too much on how they're used. I've seen SSD's last years, and SSD's last months (or weeks). A regular SSD will likely have greater durability because of its architecture. They are designed to replace existing hard drives while mSata SSD's are designed to speed up existing HDD's.

Get a regular SSD.

 

Actually, the M4 mSATA has the same controller and same NAND type as the regular M4, so they should have relatively similar lifespan.

 

Yeah, if you compare SSD's from the same company, sure, they should have similar life spans. Depending on what he plans to use it for will determine which is best to get.

 

The only differences that I can think of would be that the mSATA port on the notebook is SATA 2 and the main bay is SATA 3 which is rather common or that somehow, the BIOS only allows the mSATA to be used for caching.

Aside from that, assuming equivalent SATA revision, the mSATA and 2.5" M4s will perform identically for data, OS or whatever you decide to use them as long as the laptop BIOS allows you to treat the mSATA as a normal drive.

The way I understood it, the OP asked specifically about the M4 mSATA and the 2.5" M4, not about M4 vs mSATA in general.

 

They should be about the same, about 20 years... don't worry about it.

 

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

Guys most 2.5" Drives use 8 chips while mSATA uses 4 chips. A 2.5" SSD will use all 8 channels on the SSD controller while mSATA will only use 4 of the possible 8 channels. Due to this mSATA SSD is a little bit slower than it's 2.5" counter part and the flash would wear out sooner under equal use because you have 4 chips that can take 5K Cycles vs 8 chips.

That being said the bottom 99% of computer users will not notice a difference during use and 5K cycles will not be reached during your computers life span unless you are using it as a server that is continually reading writing and erasing all of the data on it.

MyDigitalSSD

 

Nice summary.

My own take on the whole SSD speed issue, and also the SATA II vs SATA III thing, is that it gets blown way out of proportion in posting here on NBR.

Meaning that I'm perfectly happy with mSATA SSD performance (M4 256GB) on my X220 laptop. Note that the slightly old X220 laptop only has SATA II capability with a mSATA SSD drive.

My newer slightly faster (i5 I.B.) T530 has a boot 2.5" SSD in the main bay (M4 512GB), and both the drive and laptop (main bay) have SATA III capability. Performance of the T530 is just barely noticeably faster than that of the X220, both with very recent fresh installs of Win7/64_Pro.

Totally agreed on that!

 

The main reason you see no difference between SATA II and SATA III is: The bottle neck that SSD solves vs. an HDD is the random read and write speeds not sustained speeds. To date there are no manufacturers that can produce a drive that will peg the SATA II Bus speeds in a random 4K write test.

Furthermore an HDDs random 4K write and read are at around 1MB/sec while an SSD can reach 40MB/sec or higher (40 times faster). Regarding SSD vs. SSD Moving from an HDD to an SSD vs. a faster SSD would be like going from a house and buggy (HDD) to a Jeep (SSD 1) to a (Ferrari SSD 2). Most any SSD is a giant leap.

That being said for those of you seeking the Ferrari of SSD I do have something you must see. Be careful you may duel while viewing this item http://mydigitalssd.com/2.5-inch-sata-ssd.php#25-sss-sata-ssd

 

Interesting, but to my view price/GB is dominant. Which is why I went with M4 SSD.

I'll wait for Crucial's M500 mSATA 512GB drive, not to mention a few real reviews like at anandtech.

 

I agree 100% just had to toss that in there for the top 1%

Our MyDigitalSSD BP4 or the Crucial M4 are perfect mSATA drives to enter the SSD market with as they have a low Price/GB ratio with stellar performance.

 

I've always had more issues with mSata SSD's than regular SSD's. I'm not sure why, but they've always died earlier and slowed down faster, or simply were not as fast as described. However, any mSata is faster than an HDD, so it did help. I would recommend a regular SSD over an mSata SSD 99% of the time. The lifespan depends on the usage. New drives should least at least one year before slowing down or something.

I've used Crucial, Mushkin, and Liteon. The Mushkin was the best of the three. The Liteon died after 72 hours, and the Crucial slowed down after a month. After about 6 months of using mSata SSD's, I went back to SSD's and haven't used mSata's since.

 

Which means that you have zero recent mSATA experience.

FWIW (to others) your post also doesn't say anything positive with regard to your having bought early into the whole SSD mess.

 

What suggests that?

This occurred through December 2012. I actually had the Liteon in January of this year. The issues with the Liteon could have been related to the BIOS, but I'm not sure.

As I said above, they helped a lot, but I don't believe they are as reliable as regular SSD's based on my experience with them.

 

Could be bad luck, I would've thought mSATA drives to be more reliable simply because of less components.....less potential engineering points of failure. E.g. all mSATA drives have only 4 NAND cells while most 2.5 inch drives have 8-16 NAND units thats basically double or quadruple the chance of failure just by NAND content alone.
Though, whether they use worse binned cells for mSATA I do not know, MyDigitalSSD could provide an answer to that.

 

J.Dre, the new BP4 will not suffer the slow down effects you speak of we added over-provisioning to solve this problem and TRIM support is key. Many of the older drives suffered from this slow down effect because of the lack of trim support mSATA and 2.5".

As far as life spans I can only speak from our experience: We started shipping the 1st Bullet Proof mSATA back in early 2011 and we have not a single unit back that was simply used up. As a matter of fact out of thousands of drives shipped we have only received a hand full of defective drives maybe 20-30pcs total in just about 2 years with 90% of those being DOA. Very few (less than.1/1000) of our drives have ever failed in the field.

So I can say with certainty we have not had any problems with drive longevity. I would take that right out of the equation. I would be more worried about bad soldering, PCB layout, and burnt capacitors. In my experience for the past 6 years with SSD those are what makes an SSD fail more often than not.

Most people will not be able to tell the difference between an mSATA and a 2.5" making it a prime choice for laptops and tablets. Light weight and many times you can pair them with HDDs for storage in laptops.

MyDigitalSSD

 

many people are oblivious to SSD tech but they thought they know cause of a few reviews =D I am one of many, and reviewers not always in the right, Anand is an example but they are legit most of the time, unlike TSSDR lol

new crucial m4 SSD changed from I believe 25nm to 20nm? so expect some endurance loss from it's msata line up. however an old m4 256gb MLC SSD is able to last 1 full year of random writes almost 24/7, if msata uses 25nm at 128gb, thats fairly good for lifespan. on the other hand BF4 uses 19/20nm and 16k block per page instead of 8k block per page for faster sequential output so doing random data on it won't be a good idea.

finally +1 to mydigitalSSD, great services when I purchased two S301 SLC SSD, just wanted to say thanks, I'd buy again if I have money to burn.