The next software we used was the ATTO Disk Benchmark. The tool measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. The benchmark performs file transfers ranging from 0.5 KB to 8192 KB.

The drive gave the expected performance with an average more than 270MB/s for write and more than 440MB/s for read , with files larger than 128 KB, in Queue Depth 4:

Generally, ATTO is the preferred standard benchmarking software as while it runs spot data is has several advantages over other HDD benchmarks including the fact that it shows the specific speed of each file size transfer and shows a true average, this benchmarking product also doesn't seem to favor SRAM over DRAM caches.

As you see below, the Crucial m4 256GB is very fast when reading and writing 4K files:

On the other hand, it is slower when dealing with larger files, at least compared with SandForce -based SSDs such as the Vertex 3 and the Agility 3:

The next benchmark is the CrystalDiskMark. The software provides throughput data based on sequential reads and writes, and random (512K/4K/4KQD32) reads and writes. The Crucial m4 256GB SSD provided consistent performance with impressive 4k random write scores. The score is very much improved over the C300.