When your parent company is the owner of one of the largest NAND fabs in the world, it gives you some perks. Your cost of NAND is lower, your engineers know the NAND better, and you’re able to obtain creme of the crop NAND that, quite frankly, you don’t want anybody else to have. I generally refer to these lucky guys as Tier 1 SSD manufacturers and it pretty much only consists of Intel, Micron, Samsung, SanDisk, Toshiba, and SK Hynix.

Now a little more than two years ago, Crucial introduced their M4 SSD which was pretty revolutionary at the time. Most of the Tier 1 SSD manufacturers had little to nothing to show for on the consumer side, instead focusing most of their efforts on their OEM businesses. This left a good chunk of the market untapped and when Crucial unveiled the M4, it quickly became one of the best selling SSDs out on the market. While it wasn’t the fastest SSD out there, it had great reliability and low pricing – a winning combination at a time when SSD technology was still in its infancy.