Crucial Crucial MX300 275GB 3D NAND SSD CT275MX300SSD1

Bought two of these 525GB MX300’s to replace a 256GB M500 and 256GB M550 in my desktop and laptop. My goal was to clone both drives so I could swap them out without having to reinstall anything or lose any files.

First, be sure you download the two pieces of software that help you get the most out of your new SSD: Crucial Storage Executive (displays info about supported drives, including SMART data and allows you to enable Momentum Cache – more on this later), and Acronis True Image for Crucial.

There are a fair number of reviewers stating their drives failed after 10-12 months. I’m optimistic if the drive are going to have issues, the SMART software would identify these issues. Both existing drives that I replaced had 95-96% of their remaining lifespan and there were 0 bad sectors. I was able to see this data in the Storage Executive software.

I first connected the SSD to a USB port using a SATA to USB cable connector (get one of these if you want to clone your drive for laptops or desktops without open SATA and power connectors – this is the one I used 

StarTech USB 3.0 to 2.5″ SATA III Hard Drive Adapter Cable w/ UASP – SATA to USB 3.0 Converter for SSD/HDD

). Using the Storage Executive software, I confirmed the drive was recognized, healthy and not initialized (partitioned). The firmware was already up to date, another nice feature of the SE software.

Next I installed Acronis True Image to perform the cloning. There is no fee to use the software, but it will only install as long as one of the active drives on your system is made by Crucial. The process from there is pretty simple – roughly 4 steps. 1) Choose clone; 2) choose source drive (most likely your C: drive) – I choose the automatic clone method, btw; 3) choose destination drive (your new SSD); and 4) proceed with clone/reboot.

It took about 30 minutes for my laptop and 75 minutes for my desktop (different aged systems and speeds). Both clones worked perfectly on the first try and I had no issues booting up after swapping the drives.

Getting back to the Momentum Cache setting – the MX300’s allow you to utilize some of your DRAM for random write jobs in such a way that it can increase write speed by up to 10x. This is because all the random data will be temporarily stored to DRAM (up to 25% of available system memory or 4GB, whichever is less, and then it will write the data sequentially. According to Crucial, the benefit is faster write speeds (you won’t see increased read speeds, so you won’t see a performance increase when starting up the computer or using it under normal conditions), and it also helps extend the life of the drive as random writes will wear out the drive faster than sequential writes.

Knowing I have so much remaining life on the drives I’m replacing (due to running out of space), I am going to repurpose them in my family’s computers, as they still have HDD’s and won’t come close to using all 256GB. I’m very happy with the older crucial drives and looking forward to years of use with these new ones.

If there are any issues in the future, I will update this review accordingly.

Disque rapide et de qualité en remplacement d’un disque classique. Crucial marque sérieuse

I’ve been a big fan of Samsung drives, but the price difference on the 1TB was enough to make me jump ship to Crucial. I use it in a gaming laptop as my data drive (I have a 250GB system drive and then the Crucial 1TB for data, games and applications).

The laptop is a recent (2017) MSI Apache 17”. It has space for one PCIe SSD and one standard SATA 3. I chose to go with a standard SATA because I’m lazy and didn’t want to mess about with moving the system disk.

Anyway, all good, and decent for a SSD (but not outstanding figures) in CrystalDiskMark. That is until I downloaded Crucial Storage Executive and enabled momentum cache.

The figures speak for themselves (see my screenshot of CrystalDiskMark).

I’ve also added a second image from Task Manager showing how momentum cache works. The G drive is a traditional HDD transferring 25GB of data to F, a 1TB SSD with momentum enabled (I’m actually installing the game Fallout 4 from G to F). You can see that the SSD only occasionally writes data (about once every 10s).

So, a very good thing about Momentum cache is the way it handles small files; it caches them to memory and only writes them to the physical SSD occasionally. This not only saves wear on your SSD, but it also makes certain tasks fly. I am a web application developer, and my build process (which involves working with literally thousands of javascript files) is now super fast (it would be even faster if node/npm was multi-threaded, but that’s another story!).

What are the downsides of doing this?

Momentum cache uses your PC memory as a read/write cache, so you need to have a decent amount of memory. My laptop has 16GB, so all good there. I suspect it will work less well for 4GB systems, or if you are using a power-hungry application (such as Adobe Premiere, which I use). It also increases the CPU overhead.
EDIT: I’re realised Windows 10 Task Manager > Memory shows you the RAM cache (its marked as ‘memory that has to be saved to disk before it can be used for something else’ or words to that effect). I copied over the full install folder of Fallout 4 plus DLCs
(29.6GB) onto a Momemtum enabled drive and the cache varied between 1 and 1.5GB. So the 4GB is never reached; more like >2GB.

Crucial strongly recommend a battery backup if you use momentum cache (i.e. you can lose the cached data on a power fail), so other things equal you should only really enable it on a laptop.

The cache is written to the real SSD on power off, so system shutdown takes longer (by 5-10s, so significant).

But yeah, just look at those figures; well recommended for laptops with memory to spare; your system flies!

Edit: Another good thing about the Crucial I’m finding is that it uses devSleep much more often than other SSDs. Since writing this review (5 months), the up-time for my SSD (according to CrystalDiskInfo) is only 9 hours when the physical up-time has been office hours (8.5 hours a day, 5 days a week). The low up-time saves both power and wear and tear, with no noticeable affect on access time. DevSleep only seems to kick in on laptops (it does not seem to affect my desktop), but is certainly something that will extend your laptop battery life (especially if you have two drives) and the life of the SSDs themselves. Oh, I also suspect the up-time is coming out so low because of Momentum Cache (RAM caching means less access requests to the SSD and more devSleep down-time), so devSleep and Momentum cache probably work together).

È il mio primo SSD, dopo aver letto tanto in merito a questi solid state drive mi sono deciso a comprarne uno.
Versione da 275GB per poter installare il S.O. (Win 10 Pro 64 bit) ed i programmi base che necessitano di un caricamento rapido dei dati.

Crucial, una delle aziende più attive in questo settore, è nota agli appassionati di tutto il mondo per l’elevata qualità e affidabilità dei suoi prodotti. Nota alla pari di Samsung per gli SSD.

Inutile dire quanto la spedizione di Amazon sia stata efficiente. Al contrario dei dischi meccanici il pacco per gli SSD è congruo con le aspettative, non essendo così delicati come gli HDD.

Confezione e Bundle:
Il design è come molto curato, anche se minimalista, il colore predominante è il bianco.
Nella parte frontale, oltre al logo dell’azienda, troviamo un’immagine che raffigura un’anteprima del drive contenuto, la serie di appartenenza e la capacità di archiviazione, in questo caso un insolito 275GB.
Girando dal lato opposto la confezione troviamo l’elenco dettagliato del materiale fornito a corredo e alcune indicazioni del produttore tradotte in diverse lingue (manca l’italiano).
Dopo aver aperto la confezione notiamo che sia l’SSD sia l’intero bundle fornito con lo solid state drive, sono ben riposti all’interno di un blister di plastica nero rigido.

Assieme all’SSD troviamo quindi:
1x Adattatore per l’installazione dell’unità in un vano da 9.5mm di spessore;
1x Cartaceo riportante il seriale per l’attivazione del software di migrazione Acronis True Image HD.

Specifiche tecniche:
Crucial Serie: MX
Serie: Crucial MX300
Fattore di forma: 2.5 “
Controller: Marvell 88SS1074
NAND: Micron 384 Gbit TLC 3D a 32 strati
DRAM: 512MB
Lettura sequenziale: 530MB / s
Scrittura sequenziale: 510MB / s
Lettura casuale file 4KB: 92K IOPS
Scrittura casuale file 4KB: 83K IOPS
Modalità risparmio energetico: 4mW
Inattività: 75mW
Massima potenza: 5.2W
Durata: 220TB
Garanzia: Tre anni

L’interfaccia di trasmissione è ovviamente conforme allo standard SATA III a 6Gb/s, quindi il massimo ottenibile dall’interfaccia classica SATA.
Al fine di garantire una buona solidità, resistenza agli urti e dissipazione del calore generato dalle componenti interne, è stato scelto l’alluminio quale materiale principale di entrambe le facce della scocca, con la parte superiore che si presenta satinata e dalle forme arrotondate.
Nella parte posteriore troviamo un’etichetta adesiva riportante il modello preciso del prodotto, con relativi numeri di serie, e un codice a barre bidimensionale (QR Code). Troviamo, inoltre, il codice PSID, indispensabile per poter sbloccare il drive nell’eventualità di smarrimento della chiave di criptazione dei dati contenuti. Questo aspetto non lo ho mai provato.

Eseguito un semplice test con l’SSD occupato solo dal sistema operativo, come detto Windows 10 Pro a 64 bit.
Il test si riferisce ad una misurazione delle prestazione con file da 1GB, SSD occupato in 20 GB e in uso dal sistema stesso.

Dopo averlo utilizzato ormai per 3 mesi posso giungere ad una conclusione:
Crucial MX300 è in competizione con i modelli Samsung EVO, quindi parliamo di una categoria intermedia di SSD.
Rappresenta il giusto compromesso tra prestazioni velocistiche ed affidabilità nel tempo, senza rinunciare ad un prezzo contenuto (anche se da un po’ di tempo il prezzo delle memorie NAND è in aumento, riscontrabile sia negli SSD sia nelle memorie RAM), risultando di fatto la soluzione ideale, per tutti coloro, che intendono abbandonare gli ormai vecchi e limitanti dischi rigidi tradizionali di tipo meccanico in favore di una ben più prestante unità allo stato solido (SSD), capace di donare nuova vita anche a sistemi non proprio al passo coi tempi, come ad esempio vecchi notebook o PC aziendali, pur senza dover affrontare un notevole esborso di denaro.