We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASUS, Palit, Crucial and Corsair.

There isn't much need to go into too much detail on what's going on today with our testbed as everything above is fairly self-explanatory. We will be using one of our lower end testbeds, though, which as you can see uses the Intel Core i3 2100 and ASUS P867 Pro.

The main stars of the testbed today are of course the four 256GB Crucial m4 drives and Areca ARC-1882i RAID card. Alongside them, we've also mentioned that we've got our older SATA III 256GB C300 drives from Crucial. These drives have been retested today on our new testbed and the new Areca ARC-1882i card. We haven't included the original tests because they can't be compared as the platform and RAID card are completely different.

As for the benchmark line-up today, we'll be checking out the performance of the two setups under CrystalDiskMark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro and AIDA64 to get read and write speeds along with other important pieces of information like access times.

It's also worth noting that the C300 drives are of course 12 months old now, so that's something that has to be considered as we know that sometimes SSD performance can drop over time. Ultimately we want to be able to show you if you're running a setup that's older, what kind of performance can you expect to see with these new drives.

Let's get started!

CrystalDiskMark

Getting into CrystalDiskMark and looking at the 100MB Write performance of the two setups, we can see across the board we've got improvements on our new m4 drives. This doesn't come as any real surprise as they're of course updated drives; you can see a nice improvement in all areas of writing, though.

Looking at read performance, we don't see the same kind of changes. In some areas we see that the m4 drives come in a little lower; this is evident in the 4K QD:32 and 4K QD:4 tests. 4K and 512K tests on the other hand see performance very similar while the sequential testing sees a nice performance boost when comparing the two setups.