Introduction

Just over 12 months ago we checked out the Crucial C300 256GB SSDs in RAID 0 and found ourselves very impressed with the performance that Crucial was offering with the new SATA drives. The C300 drives from Crucial were one of the first SATA III drives to come out and in RAID 0 we saw some awesome performance out of the 1TB setup via the four 256GB drives.

Today we jump forward and find ourselves looking at the brand new m4 drives from Crucial to see what's going on with performance. We'll also be taking the same approach as we did last year with the four drives on hand which will again be running in RAID 0.

Outside of the new m4 drives, though, we've got ourselves a brand new Areca RAID card to make sure we're able to get the most amount of performance out of our drives. We'll take a closer look at that in just a moment, along with a closer look at the drives themselves.

Since there's no real formula to what we're doing today, we'll start off by taking a closer look at the hardware we're using; once that's done we'll check out the testbed and then we'll just get stuck straight into the performance side of things to see just what the new m4 setup is offering us when compared to the older C300 setup that's been working hard for the past 12 months.

So with that all said and done, let's get into it and take a closer look at the m4 drives and our Areca RAID card we have on hand.