Well I think it is a problem with the Crucial M4. I tried cloning and the process fails several times. I put an entirely different M4 in and it acted the same way. I eventually got one cloned but when the OS boots up there are beach balls galore! The only other thing it could be is the SATA cable I got from iFixit (highly unlikely).
If it wasn't such a pain to update the firmware on OS X without a SuperDrive, I would just try different versions. Anyone know if I would be able to update with any external optical drive?
My only other option is to get a Samsung instead. Looks like I missed the blowout prices on the 830s
. Most are OOS now and replaced with 840s.