Like any innovative tech company, we're always searching for ways to make our products better. We've engineered some big read performance gains that will make a noticeable difference for our C400 and m4 SSDs. We're bundling the improvements into our latest firmware release, which is available now for all customers.
Like any firmware release, we built in the usual stability and reliability improvements that our testing team identified over the past months. But the real news is that the new code provides a significant boost in read performance across all capacities. Sequential reads are up by 20% for all drives (85 MB/s increase), putting the C400/m4 over the 500 MB/s mark. Random 4k reads are up, too. And PCMark scores—which we believe are one of the better measures of real-world usage—are up by 15%.
The table below summarizes the basic spec changes.
| |
Original |
With New FW |
|
| Sequential READ |
415 MB/s |
500 MB/s |
20% faster |
| 4k Read IOPs |
40k |
45k |
12% faster |
Of course, to appreciate these changes, you'll need to be running the SSD on a system that provides a SATA 6 Gb/s connection (since SATA 3 Gb/s systems cap out at less than 300 MB/s).
Micron customers will be notified of the code change (and how to upgrade) through our usual PCN process. If you're a retail customer, you can find instructions to download the latest code on Crucial's website.
Our client SSDs are already a favorite among users who value stability, reliability, and good performance at a great price. This upgrade makes the C400/m4 SSDs an even more compelling choice, and is a great way to thank all of our customers for choosing Micron. Enjoy!