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Crucial M225 256GB review

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Verdict

A huge SSD that’s blazingly fast in every category

Review Date: 12 Apr 2010

Reviewed By: Darien Graham-Smith

Price when reviewed: £420 (£494 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
6 stars out of 6

Value for Money
4 stars out of 6

Performance
6 stars out of 6

PCPRO Recommended

It’s not cheap, but the 256GB Crucial M225 is capacious enough to be the only drive in your system. That’s ideal if you’re looking to upgrade a laptop, and for desktop systems the single-drive option could help keep internal spaghetti to a minimum.

And though the up-front cost is high, at £1.76 per gigabyte the M225 is actually better value than most SSDs on the market. Sure, platter-based drives go for a tenth as much, but for what it is, the Crucial is comparatively cheap.

The real attraction, though, is performance. In our tests the M225 achieved a phenomenal 219MB/sec sequential read speed – rather more than twice the 101MB/sec achieved by a mechanical Samsung SpinPoint drive – and kept up 68MB/sec in our small-file read test while the Samsung averaged 59MB/sec.

Write performance was impressive too. Historically this is an area where SSDs have stumbled; but the M225’s 158MB/sec sequential write speed put the 94MB/sec Samsung to shame. Even when taxed with multi-threaded 4K writes the drive kept up an average rate of 13MB/sec — while its mechanical rival plummeted to just 1.1MB/sec.

In short, the M225 proved significantly faster than a mechanical drive in all of our tests; and, as you'd hope, automatic housekeeping via the TRIM command is supported, so if you use this drive with Windows 7 it should maintain its performance. That means you can expect it to provide a consistent speed boost no matter how you use your PC.

Not everyone’s wallet will stretch to a drive this size, but if you have the cash to spend, the M225’s value, plus an excellent five-year warranty, make it an unbeatable choice.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith

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Comments

User comments

Trim?

Does it support Trim?

By jmiii on 13 Apr 2010

Good point. Yes, it supports TRIM. Thanks for the comment - I'll update the review to make that clear!

By DarienGS on 13 Apr 2010

Physical form factor?

Thanks for the review of something of a watershed product. Still too pricey for me though!

I assume from the picture it's 2.5". My laptop takes 1.8" drives but just thought I'd check.

By Cantabrian on 13 Apr 2010

SATA

Possibly silly question - is this a SATA 2 or 3 drive? Would this make any difference to performance anyway?

By piphil on 14 Apr 2010

SSDs would make a good topic for a full Article

This particular drive whilst relatively economical by SSC standards is very far from leading-edge.
It uses the Indillix Barefoot controller which was the best of the older generation drives, but is now a little out of date (read "slow").

As per my title a thorough review of the current "state of the art" with SSDs would make a great PcPro article!

By wittgenfrog on 14 Apr 2010

I agree entirely... check out issue 188 of PC Pro, on sale tomorrow, in which I put 18 models to the test!

(And for the record, to answer an earlier comment, this is a SATA/300 drive.)

By DarienGS on 14 Apr 2010

@DarienGS - BAH!!! HUMBUG, and where's my subscription copy got to!

By wittgenfrog on 14 Apr 2010

Intel X25 80GB

Regarding performance, how does it compare to the Intel X25 80GB? Recently I put such a disk in a SMB server, result is interesting but not marvelous.

By fleboutte on 15 Apr 2010

Crucial RealSSD

How about reviewing the new Crucial RealSSD C300 SATA 6 drive?

By boriscr on 15 Apr 2010

Anyone interested in an SSD should read the articles at Anandtech.com. There is some very good in-depth information regarding the various controllers, and how they affect performance.

By Ex_Sailor on 18 Apr 2010

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