Hardware Review
Crucial CT128M225 SSD
If you're an enthusiast, there's one thing you're always looking for, extra perfromance. Solid State Drives (SSD) has grown immensely in popularity. SSD has become the storage of choice for the enthusiast users because of their performance. Crucial has been in the memory market for many years and their products that we have reviewed hasn't disappointed us yet. Tonight we'll take a look at Crucial's new M225 128GB SSD. We would like to thank the Crucial team for making this review possible
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We're very excited to review this SSD from crucial. We can't wait to take do our test and see how it stocks up compared to a standard drive. Technically speaking SSDs feature virtually no delays on its access time and provides greater performance. Solid State Drives also don't use a lot of power, which is a great feature for mobile computing. Because there are no moving parts on an SSD drive, your notebook will run quieter and cooler. In regards to performance, the Crucial M225 can write at speeds up to 250MB/s which can improve system performance in terms of boot and application load times. Check out a more detailed specification of Crucial's M225 SSD at Crucial's website
Now let's get on with the review. The M225's outer shell is covered with brushed aluminum housing. Crucial also included pre drilled mounting holes for the drive. Let's get on with the testing. We tested our sample on our Lenovo SL400 test system, running on an Intel Core 2 Duo T6570 (2.10GHz) with 2GB of memory. We loaded up our SL400 with Windows Vista Ultimate x64. After the installation was complete, our SL400's boot time took about fourteen seconds from BIOS to the login screen. We used a couple of popular disk benchmark tools to perfrom our benchmarks. Here are the rest of our benchmarks:
We compared our Crucial M225 sample to a spare Seagate Momentus 5400.6 320GB hard drive we have. Based on the charts above, the M225 Performance was very impressive compared to a traditional SATA-II hard drive. Looking at these results we were really impressed with the M225's perfromance. We even thought that it was faster than a RAID setup we have in one of our test machines. We were wondering what kind of performance we will get if we pair this bad boy up with another CT128M225 to create a RAID array, but that is a review for another day. Stay tuned.
You can really see the performance difference between a traditional hard drive compared to the newer SSD technology. By far SSD technology takes hard drive computing to another level. Crucial M225's impressive benchmark result shows the shear performance gain you can get if you switch to SSD based drives. Though the prices for these bad boys are still somewhat steep, they are still worth the investment. Based on this benchmark scores, we're very pleased to give Crucial's M225 a score of 10 out of 10 and our Editor's Choice.
Pros:
Incredible speed performance
Excellent boot times
Low power consumption
Quieter than tradional hard drives
Cons:
Market prices for SSDs are still expensive
Manufacturer Link:
