Crucial issues firmware upgrade for its m4 series of SSDs by VR-Zone.com
Apparently there is such a thing as a free lunch, at least if you consider a free performance boost a free lunch. Crucial has issued a firmware update for its m4 series of SSDs and promises a range of performance improvements, beyond the usual fixes you'd expect to see.
SSDs are one of the few pieces of hardware that are currently so heavily dependent on the firmware version when it comes to performance and Crucial is far from the only company to offer performance increases via firmware upgrades, but the company is claiming a 20 percent boost in sequential read speeds which is no small feat to do with a simple firmware upgrade. We actually happen to be working on a review of the 256GB Crucial m4 and we'll be making sure we do some comparisons pre and post firmware upgrade.
Other improvements in the firmware upgrade includes increased throughput performance, lower write latency, improved chipset compatibility and it also fixes a problem were the drives have failed to cold boot in some systems. There's one small downside though, the firmware upgrade comes in the shape of an ISO image that has to be burned onto a CD, not exactly the smoothest way of doing things, in fact, we're not even sure we got a blank disc lying around…
Source:
Crucial