15.10.2015

When it’s comes to speed and power there is nothing better than a fast car or a powerful high end gaming PC, the last thing you want, is for your car to be compared to an old banger or your PC compared to the Console Generation. Both generations are simply behind in technology and is ultimately holding back significant advancements which could be implemented, but are not due to their limitations.Let’s a have look at the Crucial BX100 SSD 2.5”, the first thing, it’s damn small, with it only being 7mm thick, it’s just so damn small and light, damn, I am impressed. Compared to the standard drive I currently have, this is a huge improvement, if you are wondering what I currently own this is it,7200RPM 750GB HDD with a 256GB SSD Super Raid SSD’s (2x128GB SSD’s).The first thing you will notice is the speed of the boot up process, not only does Windows 8.1 improve the speed of boot up already, thanks to its improved coding, having an SSD speeds it up even more, full boot up now takes less than 5secs.My full spec of the system is as follows:Intel® Core™ i7-4700HQ Quad Core (2.4 GHz, Intel Haswell Architecture, Features Intel Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz)3" (MSI, 1920x1080 FULL HD Resolution, Anti-Glare, LED Backlit)16GB (2x8GB DDR3)256GB SSD SUPER RAID (2x128GB SSDS) + 750GB 7200RPM HDDDedicated (NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 970M Graphics with 6GB GDDR5 RAM)Microsoft Windows 8 64-bitSo with the spec now available I hope you can see, that I am not running a generation behind and the system is well in the line to play all current and upcoming games, and the new SSD will be used to improve the system even more, within load-up times.Boring technical stuff now:As everyone should know, I only care about the product improving my gaming, technical rubbish needs to be kept on the technical sites that spend hours and hours running programs, so I got this from Ebuyer‘Performance level based on comparative benchmark scores of the Crucial BX100 SSD and the Western Digital® Caviar Blue WD10EZEX internal hard drive. Actual performance levels may vary based on the benchmark used and individual system configuration. Test setup: 1TB Crucial BX100 SSD and 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue internal hard drive, both tested on an Intel® DZ87RL motherboard, Intel i7-4770K 3.50GHz processor, BIOS Rev. 0327, and Windows® 8 Pro 64-bit operating system using PCMark Vantage HDD test suite. Benchmark testing conducted December 2014.Reliability comparison based on published MTBF ratings of the 1TB Crucial BX100 SSD (1.5 million hours) and the 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue (0.6 million hours).Active average power use comparison based on published specs of the 500GB Crucial BX100 SSD and the 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue internal hard drive.’Capacity - 1TBSequential Read - 535 MB/sSequential Write - 450 MB/s4KB Random Read - 90,000 IOPS4KB Random Write - 70,000 IOPSType - 2.5 inchHeight - 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter)Memory Type - Micron 16nm MLC NANDController - Silicon Motion SM2246EN with Crucial Custom FirmwareInterface - SATA 6Gbps (SATA III)MTTF - 1.5 million hoursEndurance - Total Bytes Written (TBW): 72TBW, equal to 40GB per day for 5 yearsOperating Temperature - 0°C to 70°CAdvanced Features - Thermal Monitoring, Data Path Protection, Active Garbage Collection,Trim Support, Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology (SMART), Error Correction Code (ECC)Compliance - CE, FCC, BSMI, C-Tick, VCCI, Kcc, RoHS, China RoHS, WEEE, TUV, UL, SATA-IONow for the juicy bit games and gaming in general, how did the SSD improve on that? Did it do anything special,did it improve load times, well? Let’s find out.First lets see what games I will be testing this time, they have to be load heavy games, how about Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Dying Light and finally Farcry 4 all games are load heavy on an STD hard drive and can take some time to load anything.First Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor from Warner Bros, the load time of the 7600 RPM HDD, (I used my phone counter for this) Loaded into game 20secs, load up the stage 22secs (rounded to the nearest decimal point). Now let’s look at the speed the game loads up with the SSD 8secs to load up the game and 11secs to load into the game. Now that’s 50% faster, which equals less waiting around, but not enough time to make a coffee.Next game to be tested, Farcry 4 from Ubisoft an open world action adventure game, the load time on the STD drive was, 15 secs to load up the game, not bad I reckon, not to load into the game, 11secs. Using the SSD now I hoped to see a 50% increase in, load up times, instead I got 8secs to load up the game and 5secs to load into the game.Now for the final game, a game that loaded pretty fast in the first place, this game was very well optimised for PC if you ask me. Dying Light again from Warner Bros, is a massive open world Zombie infested kill-a-thone, possibly one of the best Zombie games to date. Moving on to the loading times, 9secs to load up the game and 8secs to load into the game, moving to the SSD, it took a mere 3secs to load up the game and a mere 4secs to load into the game.Overall, we get an average of a 50% increase in speed, even with loading into Windows 8 takes a blink of an eye, then you are in, everything runs and loads a lot faster that any STD drive. For a gamer speed of loading can be a great advantage in multi-player games like the new Evolve from 2K Games, the last thing you want to do, is hold up the rest due to your slow arse system load times.I totally love this upgrade and I can see me upgrading all my STD drives to SSD in time, as the price of them are going down, lower and lower, this 1TB is currently less than £300, which to me is a bloody bargain. There are other SSD’s on the market more expensive and claim to be faster and better, However I do not know this and can not comment, there is one thing I can see, the faster they become the more expensive they become, and for this one, even though its Crucials basic SSD its damn good, with what it has to offers.Comment Comment | Permalink

5.2.2015

I’m updating this review for the second time (and improving my rating of it after six months’ experience), for the sole benefit of those who number themselves amongst the 250 million people worldwide who are still using XP, and have no need, or no desire, or simply can’t afford donate more money to Microsoft for the latest version (or who would rather spend any spare cash on a smart new SSD instead…).The superficial advantages of SSDs are, small size, silent operation, cool running, extra reliability (no moving parts), and speediness (relative to standard HDs). There are those who say – wrongly, as you will see – that they cannot be used with OSs prior to Win7 because only from that OS was a system known as TRIM incorporated.TRIM was supposed to overcome the big drawback of older SSDs in that they were inefficient at disposing of garbage – items you delete, which nevertheless remain unseen to clog up space, gradually slowing down the drive. The fact is, however, that TRIM is no longer necessary, because for the past year or two, SSD makers have been incorporating their own garbage prevention systems into their drives, and this drive is indeed so equipped.So, I installed it into a system running XP, where it immediately performed extremely well – and continues to do so six months later on a daily basis without any noticeable change in its behaviour whatsoever. It currently houses 4 partitions, incorporating two independent installations of XP, a large documents drive and 60Gb of large image files, and is used mostly for speedy photo-processing, as well as day-to-day net duties.But should you spend £70 replacing your old HD just for cool, swift, silent running ? Well, if your PC already runs cool enough, and you don’t care if large images load a few seconds slower, or if the PC takes a minute to boot up rather than the current half a minute mine takes with the SSD, and you don’t mind the foibles of the old-style spinning platter hard drives, you might want to keep your money for something more urgent. On the other hand, for those to whom a totally silent PC is a necessity – in music applications, for example - it is a boon; and in a laptop, it might also reduce scorched knee symptoms. After six months’ daily use, I’d give it five stars if only it were a bit more price-competitive with standard HDS – it’s 4 times the price of many – but if you have the cash and you just like smart things, I’d pay out for this any day in preference to an XP upgrade… (Obviously, however, I can’t compare it with with identical products of other makes.)Finally (to allay any needless fears), amongst the many critical and uninformed comments posted on my original review were a number making the point that XP is no longer supported by Microsoft, thus leaving it vulnerable in the absence of any further security updates; wrong again fellas – go to this page to see how you can continue to receive free security updates from Microsoft until 2019:http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2014/05/27/simple-hack-gives-windows-xp-users-5-more-years-of-support/

9.2.2015

I've been thinking about upgrading to an SSD for a while, as my old drive (actually my whole PC) is somewhat aging now, having been put together (by me) during the Vista era (shudder). My main OS drive was a 500GB WD but I was only using about 180GB of space on it. For those thinking about updating to an SSD, my advice is this: do it. Do it now.I'm running Win 7 on my machine, and already run system image backups regularly, so swapping the drive out wasn't too difficult at all. I plugged the drive into a spare SATA port on my motherboard, and used my imaging software (Macrium Reflect for reference) to clone it. Then simply removed the old drive and put the new one into the old ones port.Straight up into Windows, in record time.One thing to note though, which I discovered before I installed it, is that SSD drives very much like the SATA operating mode to be AHCI mode (this is changed in BIOS on the motherboard). For standard machines it doesn't make much of a difference unless the drive is in a server and has constant write usage, but aparrently it means a fair perfomance boost for SSD drives. My machine was still in IDE mode, so I swapped to AHCI before cloning the drive. Word of warning here: you'll need to prep your OS before changing it, as Windows won't boot without it. There is a Microsoft Fixit for this, just google KB 922976. There are also a few other tweaks you can make to improve life and performance, such as checking to see if trim is enabled and disabling indexing (if no other software functions you use rely on it).Another thing to note is that the drive is small, and didn't fit easily in my chassis, which is ancient (as I said, Vista era). However, it's so light I was able to attach it using 1 screw in a standard bay, leaving my old drive in as a spare if I ever need it. Bad practice for sure, but it worked. Another reviewer mentioned there should be some migration software included. I think this is ridiculous. It's ultimately just a hard drive, and no drive ever has come with software to migrate your operating system. There's lots of free 3rd party for that, like Macrium Reflect for example. Do your research before migrating data, and back up.So, once it was in and working, I noticed a massive difference straight away. Logging on used to take at least 4-5 minutes from boot to desktop with software loaded, now it's under a minute. Software loads pretty much instantly, and shutdown is more like 15 seconds rather than 90. Everything is much more responsive to use, no hanging on loading anymore, no slowdowns while waiting for the drive to catch up. It's totally transformed the performance of my machine. There is also an associated Crucial tool called Crucial Storage Executive that allows drive firmware updates and monitoring, although for tweakers and info nerds only (like me) only.This is a very nice drive, at a relatively good price point for performance. Definitely recommended.

23.4.2016

I bought this SSD because my HD was slowing down my gaming PC. After searching Google and browsing Amazon, I came across the Crucial BX200 but everybody was saying the BX100 one is better and faster so I decided on this one.I've never used a SSD before so i'm not an expert on SSD's. Upon receiving it, i opened it up and saw it was smaller than I expected, which isn't a bad thing. It doesn't really feel like premium material was used to make it but I think that may be because I am used to normal Hard Drives which are made from heavy duty metal. This came in a small square box which includes the SSD inside static proof packaging, a spacer for the underside of the SSD and a leaflet and a product key for a program to clone the HD.

24.8.2015

The first SSD that I got somehow did not work with my computer, so I requested another one and works like a charm. Loading windows 8.1 on this is amazing and quick. It took my around 5 min to start up my computer and load an Internet browser with my HDD, but it takes me roughly 30s to 1min with this SSD (I have around 10 programs set to open during startup, which is why it takes a little longer than others). If you already have a computer with a HDD and you are planning to upgrade to an SSD and to use the HDD as storage, I strongly recommend not doing the cloning process. Despite the ease of doing it, it is far more relieving and simple to do a fresh install of windows. Here are the steps I went through.1.

4.2.2015

Upgraded my Late 2011 MacBook Pro from a 500GB spinning hard drive to this. Instead of taking a solid minute or so to boot up, it takes ten seconds and it's more responsive than my old HDD. My computer is faster than it ever was before and feels brand new. The battery is also better too.This was my first time upgrading a Hard Drive, and it was incredibly easy. I used a StarTech.com USB 3.0 to 2.5" SATA III Hard Drive Adapter Cable & the TEKTON 2830 Everybit Tool Kit (both sold on Amazon) to help me with this. Here's how I did it:1. Plug SSD into USB to SATA cable.2. Use Disk Utility to format the SSD.

31.3.2015

I bought this SSD specifically for a Macbook Pro 13inch so this review only relates to an install on this device.Firstly the SSD is well made and fits beautifully, it took all of 10 mins to open the MacBook remove the hard drive and install this device. By restarting the MacBook holding down the 'Command' and 'R' Key it automatically set itself up and presented the screen options to set up from Time machine, use disc utility or download the operating system via the internet - all very clever stuff.I reinstalled from my time machine and it took just under two hours. The MacBook was than identical in every way to how it had been but so much quicker - its like having a new laptop.So why only 4

26.3.2015

Amazon lumps together reviews of all sizes of BX100 series SSDs, as though all they all had the same performance. They don't. According to Crucial, while sequential reads are 535 MB/s on all BX100 drives, sequential writes are at least twice as fast on the larger drives as on the 120 GB drive, 370MB or 450 MB/sec vs. 185 MB/sec.Here is my quick comparison of my five year old laptop's performance with the original 5200RPM 250GB hard drive vs. the 120GB BX100 SSD. Again, this 120GB SSD is slower than the larger BX100s.Performance:SSD boots in 29 seconds. Hard drive boots in 53 seconds. (Identical C: drive contents.)Copying the same folder containing about 1 GB of random-sized files from the C: to D: partition required 20 seconds using the SSD vs.

23.7.2015

buying an ssd is confusing isn't it ? with so many alternatives out there all making different claims . this BX100 250gb is a middle of the road performer (and crucial to be fair advertise it as such) . the drive comes with a spacer (to fit to older laptops which used a 9.5mm disk) and a code to activate a limited version of Acronis which you have to download . the Acronis software works fine to clone your existing disk to the ssd ( you need cables/disk enclosure to attach your ssd via usb which aren't included) . i have two of these drives one i bought for £63 and one i got on prime day for £50 . one i fitted to my desktop pc the other is in my mac mini .

11.5.2015

This had been on special offer which I missed, but still not a bad price in historical terms. I had difficulty cloning my old 1 TB hard disk using the free version of Macrium Reflect, which I downloaded separately.. The partition sizes on the HD were bigger than the 250GB of the SSD. Reflect does not show a drive in the target cloning box unless it is large enough, which led me to believe it could not see the SSD at all. Eventually with a bit of jiggery-pokery in Reflect I managed to clone the HD, which shows it can be done. Obviously if the used space on your HD is larger than the SSD, you would only clone what is required. I kept my Documents folder on the old HD so I could index documents,

30.8.2015

I have this installed as one of two internal HDs in aa Toshiba Qosmio laptop. The other drive is the system drive which is a 250 MB Sandisk SSD (which I will review soon). Both are replacements of the original larger but much slower standard HDDs.I have only had this product for about a month, so it is too soon to testify as to it's reliablity. I have not done any significant speed testing, but I can say that files transfer noticably faster between the two drives.I did one very unscientific speed test, copying a folder from the system drive to the Crucial data drive.The average file size was 381kBytes, but that is greatly skewed by a few much larger files.

3.5.2016

I am recent convert to solid state drives. This one was to go in a small laptop that I wanted to give a speed boost. Since the laptop is a netbook type and not especially new (pentium M processor with single core), I was not expecting wonders. However, the laptop has been working very well and starts up very quickly on Windows 7. I have now taken to shutting the laptop down rather than putting it to sleep because it starts up so quickly there is no need to use the sleep function. I did not need to use the supplied backup/migration software, so I cannot say how well that would work. I would say though that I have since put a different SSD into my main computer and attempted various means of migrating the OS from the original HD to the new SSD.

13.3.2015

I purchased the 500GB model of this SSD. Used it to replace a 1TB WD Black being used on a Windows 7 gaming rig. The difference is night and day. I use Linux most of the time, which handles being ran off of a regular HDD just fine. But Windows just runs horribly on them. Upgrading to SSD has dramatically dropped boot times, load times, and overall stutter that I was previously experiencing on the computer. If you're on Windows, you absolutely need an SSD.The price on this drive is just right. The perfect balance between size and price. The drive itself isn't top end, there are much better SSDs out there, but at this price point you really can't complain. If you want to drop an extra $100 just to get the best SSD out there,

30.7.2016

I have a high spec! HP Desktop PC that is 18 months old. It came with a single 3tb sata drive and windows 8.1 64bit. It was OK for a while but not as speedy as I expected. We have 2 users set-up on the machine and are both photographers so use Lightroom and Photoshop a lot.After upgrading to Windows 10 the PC slowed considerably - start ups were taking many minutes. After much investigatory work the only thing anyone could find that wasn't up to scratch was the hard drive.So with advice from cleverer people than me I purchased this SSD to install as a boot drive and to contain all programs etc. Installing was a breeze and then did a fresh install of Windows 10.

23.4.2015

This certainly seemed, and I think is, good value for money. It comes with no software or instructions but all of that can be found for free from the Net. I finally managed to get the disc into operation (cloning the folders and files from my existing Windows 'C' drive was easy enough but transferring the boot files was not so straightforward) and so far it is working very well. I did not bother buying a fixing bracket as this thing is so light that the connecting cables hold it in place in my desktop tower. Not quite the dramatic improvement in speed that I was expecting based on what I had read, but what was a three minute boot time is now down to around 50 seconds (even after keeping a careful eye on my start up programmes).

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