Yesterday Crucial released a new firmware for the whole M4 SSD lineup, the update over 0009 version was needed because of the so called 5200 hours bug.
Basicly, every M4 after a power on time of 5200 hours or so will start to hung every hour, this is because something is messed up with the SMART data.
This new firmware resolve this bug.
Yesterday’s evening I’ve upgraded at this new version of the firmware the M4-128GB I’ve in my Thinkpad.
Crucial doesn’t provide an update tool different from an ISO image to be burned on a CD but I’ve no DVD drive in my laptop.
So I dusted of UNetbootin and created a bootable USB drive with the update tool inside.
Then normally booted up from USB and followed the how to flash guide Crucial provide on its site.
There was no need to set SATA controller in IDE mode, I’ve performed the update while in AHCI mode without any kind of issue.

I was just curious to see what is the impact of the update over performance, so I did a quick before and after test with ATTO.

before

after

Performance difference is close to nothing.
This is how every brand should do, if they find a problem they have to solve it in a fair ammount of time, not like the others are doing with their Sandforce based drives that after 6 months or so are still having problems.
Well done Crucial.