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Crucial 256GB SSD for ultrathin debuts at $226

Crucial's tiny solid-state drives boast big storage, ranging up to 256GB.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
Crucial m4 mSATA solid-state drive is tiny but is available in capacities up to 256GB.
Crucial m4 mSATA solid-state drive is tiny but is available in capacities up to 256GB. Micron Technology

Crucial announced today a bevy of solid-state drives for skinny gadgets ranging up to 256GB.

Sold under the Crucial brand name (the flash memory used in the SSDs is manufactured by parent company Micron Technology), the m4 drives deliver the performance of mainstream SSDs but in a much smaller 1.2 x 2.0 inch (3cm x 5cm) mSATA size -- the package typically used in ultrabooks and tablets.

SSDs are faster than standard spinning hard disk drives found in many laptops.

The m4 can be used as an upgrade to a device with an mSATA-compatible SSD or act as a cache to boost the performance of an existing magnetic hard disk drive.

The 256GB model is priced at $225.99, while the 128GB drive goes for $121.99.

A 64GB model is $80.99, while a 32GB is $52.99.

All drives are available now directly from Crucial.com.

The higher-capacity models deliver the best performance. For example, the 256GB version has a read rate of 500 megabytes per second (MB/s) and write speed of 260 MB/s. The smaller-capacity 32GB SSD has write performance of only 50 MB/s. All models are based on a 6-gigabits-per-second SATA interface.