The arrival of affordable, high-performance client SSDs gave us two (closely related) things: 1) a high-speed primary storage option that could work in both a notebook or a desktop, and 2) independence from traditional hard drive form factors.

Unlike traditional hard drives, solid state storage didn't have the same correlation between performance and physical size. The 2.5" form factor was chosen initially because of the rising popularity of notebooks and the fact that desktops could use a 2.5" drive with the aid of a cheap adapter. Since then, many desktop cases now ship with 2.5" drive bays.

It turns out that even the 2.5 wide, 9.5mm tall form factor was a bit overkill for many SSDs. We saw the first examples of this with the arrival of drives from Corsair and Kingston, where the majority of the 2.5" enclosure went unused. Intel and others also launched 1.8" versions of their SSDs with performance levels comparable to their 2.5" counterparts.

Moore's Law ensures that large SSDs can be delivered in small packages. Take the original Intel X25-M for example. The first 80GB and 160GB drives used a 50nm 4GB MLC NAND die (1 or 2 die per package), across twenty packages. Intel's SSD 320, on the other hand, uses 25nm NAND to deliver 300GB or 600GB of storage in the same package configuration. As with all things Moore's Law enables, you can scale in both directions - either increase capacity in a 2.5" form factor, or enable smaller form factors with the same capacity.

The Ultrabook movement has encouraged development of the latter. While Apple and ASUS (among others) have picked custom form factors for their smallest form factor SSDs, there's always a need for standardization. One option is the mSATA form factor:

Take a mini PCIe card, use the same connector, but make it electrically compatible with SATA and you've got mSATA. It's even possible to build an mSATA/mini PCIe connector that can switch between the two interfaces.

We met our first mSATA SSD with Intel's SSD 310, however today Micron is announcing an mSATA version of its popular C400 drive.

Read on for our full review!

Over the past year we've tested more than twenty different enclosures using our existing testbed and produced a mountain of comparative data. The goal of the undertaking is produce actual case reviews rather than testing enclosures in a vaccuum. Our approach has allowed us to compare both cooling performance and acoustics between the cases we've tested.

That said, it was really our first effort at such an endeavor in some time, and since we started some minor inconsistencies began to creep up in our reviews and between test cases. Now that we have data under our belts, we're now taking measures to correct those inconsistencies for future tests, improve the quality of our results, and allow for more reliable comparisons. In other words, we're about to revamp our case testbed and methodology, and hopefully this setup can last us through the next year.

When we first reviewed Crucial's m4 SSD we came away with mixed feelings on the drive. In some cases it was the first or second fastest drive we'd reviewed, while in others it struggled to outperform last year's C300. While Crucial has been diligent in updating the m4 to fix compatibility issues, we haven't seen any of the performance increases Crucial promised at the drive's introduction.

That all changed last week as Crucial posted the latest 0009 firmware for the m4 and Micron C400. Read on for our analysis of the performance update and a quick recap of the m4's role in the marketplace.

A year ago whenever I'd request an SSD for review I'd usually get a 128GB drive built using 3x nm 4GB 2-bit MLC NAND die. These days the standard review capacity is twice that as most drives ship with 25nm NAND, using 8GB die. Seeing a bunch of scores for 240GB+ drives however is frustrating to all involved. At these capacities you're almost always looking at two die per NAND device, which has significant performance benefits due to interleaving. Most SSD controllers have eight NAND channels and with sixteen NAND deviecs with two die per device that's four NAND die that the controller can interleave access between for each channel. The 128GB drives by comparison halve the number of NAND, which only allows the controller to interleave requests among two die.

How read interleaving works on a single channel

Not only are these 240GB+ drives the best case performance you'd see from a particular SSD, they are also very expensive. At around $2/GB you're looking at over $500 for a high end 240GB+ SSD. I've spent the past few weeks gathering modern SSDs with 128GB of NAND on-board to provide a look at a more balanced point in the price/capacity spectrum.

Read on for our roundup of 120GB drives.

Last week I was in Orlando attending CTIA. While enjoying the Florida weather, two SSDs arrived at my office back in NC: Intel's SSD 320, which we just reviewed three days ago and Crucial's m4. Many of you noticed that I had snuck in m4 results in our 320 review but I saved any analysis/conclusions about the drive for its own review.

There are more drives that I've been testing that are missing their own full reviews. Corsair's Performance Series 3 has been in the lab for weeks now, as has Samsung's SSD 470. I'll be talking about both of those in greater detail in an upcoming article as well.

And for those of you asking about my thoughts on the recent OCZ related stuff that has been making the rounds, expect to see all of that addressed in our review of the final Vertex 3. OCZ missed its original March release timeframe for the Vertex 3 in order to fix some last minute bugs with a new firmware revision, so we should be seeing drives hit the market shortly.

Read on for our full review of Crucial's m4!

The promise was high. Crucial was to not only offer better than X25-M performance but also be the first to deliver a 6Gbps SSD. Competing controller makers wouldn't hit 6Gbps until Q3/Q4 at the earliest. Two things stood in Crucial's way: 1) a little company called SandForce and, 2) a pesky set of firmware issues.

With the latter taken care of, and the former dropping prices to be more aggressive in the market, it's about time that we gave Crucial's C300 SSD a good look.

Poor Crucial. Although it started its C300 campaign on the right foot, posting some very impressive sequential read speeds thanks to 6Gbps SATA and ONFI 2.0 NAND, things haven't been so smooth lately.

First off, Crucial's timing was unfortunate as it was right around the time we started seeing SandForce make some noise. Secondly, while performance was good, my drive showed some performance and reliability issues within two weeks of receiving it. And third, the firmware update that was supposed to address the problems I had managed to brick some drives. 

If you bought a C300 there was a chance that your drive would brick itself by just using it. If you used the firmware that fixed the aforementioned problem, then there was a chance the process would brick your drive. 

Crucial just gave me an update on the situation and things appear to be looking up:

Back in March I posted an update on my experiences with Crucial's RealSSD C300. In it I pointed out that not only had my review sample apparently bricked itself but I was also able to get the C300 into a state of extremely low performance (~20MB/s) that it could not get out of, even if I TRIMed the whole drive.

Crucial discovered the source of the problems and promised a fix in mid April. It's a bit later than that but we do finally have an update from Crucial. An updated fw has been posted to Crucial's site (Version 0002) and it promises the following fixes:

 Change Log:

• Improved Power Consumption
• Improved TRIM performance
• Enabled the Drive Activity Pin (Pin 11)
• Improved Robustness due to unexpected power loss
• Improved data management to reduce maximum write latency
• Improved Performance of SSD as it fills up with data
• Improved Data Integrity

The update is destructive so you'll lose all of your data when you apply it. I haven't had the opportunity to test it thoroughly yet so if you're concerned, you may want to wait until others have used it. If you are a C300 owner, please feel free to leave your experiences with the update in the comments below.

Update: It seems as though the new firmware, designed to prevent drives from bricking, appears to be bricking drives. Hold off on this one guys.

I've also requested a 128GB C300 for review and I should see that in the coming days. I've got a ton of non-SSD stuff to deal with this week so I'm not sure I'll be able to get to all of it before I leave for Spain this weekend. If I can't get it done before I leave, I'll definitely tackle it all when I get back.