In the face of increasingly stout competition, Crucial has again put their faith in a Marvell controller to power their latest flagship drive. Marvell hasn’t had the fastest SSD controllers in the past and was often left on the sidelines with many manufacturers favoring parts from Indilinx, Samsung, Intel and SandForce instead. However, they’ve always been dependable and we’ve seen their performance improve substantially as of late so we were extremely eager to get Crucial’s new M550 drive powered by the Marvell 88SS9187 controller on our test bench. We won’t give away all the goods in the first paragraph but suffice it to say that we were duly impressed with the results...