31.3.2015

On their initial appearance, SSD drives were widely regarded among top cricket pundits as having closely mirrored the career of Pakistani fast-bowler Shoaib Akhtar- being, as they were, blindingly fast yet shockingly unreliable. However, in recent years the stability appears to have improved somewhat. The MX-200 (which seemingly evolved from being a type of sports car, at some stage between its fifth and present incantation, to being an SSD) is said to come with enviable reliability, boasting a whopping MTTF of 1.5 million hours. Quite frankly, I haven't got a clue as to what that actually means. However, anything over a round million does sound rather large indeed,to my uneducated eye- allowing for a positively luxurious sense of blasé assurance. I'd be more than happy to save my own mother's life on it, were it possible to do so. Statistically, anyone paying for an extended warranty (effectively equivalent to buying life insurance on a partner- although instead of winning a phenomenally large payout, you simply gain a swift replacement for your loved one) would be looking at an extremely poor expected return on their investment.Installation isn't quite as straightforward as I would have hoped and I was rather disappointed to discover that neither of the necessary wires nor an adapter for a desktop is actually included. It certainly wasn't the first time I've tried to fit 2.5 inches of solid-state disk into an inappropriately larger space and I'm quite sure that it won't be the last time either. However, after buying all the necessary kit, sure enough it slotted right into place as neatly as a rat up a drainpipe! The following process of drive cloning proved a little like the experience of receiving oral pleasure whilst under a precautionary dose of local anaesthetic. Although I was able to draw no significant sensations of pleasure from the process, I can give unequivocal assurance that it was an altogether painless experience.With 500 gigs to play with (not to be confused with "500 Giggs"- as in every loving husband's recurring nightmare- about having to stand back and watch, whilst being simultaneously cuckolded by no less than 500 manifestations of Ryan Giggs) there's plenty of space to install both basic system functions and various programmes and media files. Windows is far quicker to boot up now. Once you're in, double click on a photo and it'll be on your screen quicker than you can say "Jumping Jack Flash". Admittedly the same was true of my hard drive, but the important thing is that you don't get to say quite so much of the first word.Anyway, with good reliability and high speeds, this would almost certainly be my first choice of drive for any cabinet ministers, peers or members of the Royal Family who are looking to preserve souvenirs of the tireless dedication that they like to display (behind, ahem, closed doors) towards... Yes, that's right, the nation's youth. "Long" as the arm of the law may be, with the technology behind "Inspector Gadget" as yet remaining a work of pure scientific fiction, there's not an officer in this land with sufficient reach to bypass the gates of either Westminster or Buckingham palace, in order to conduct a suitably thorough criminal investigation. At least, not without ending up hanging from his own ceiling- with a pair of tights around his neck, a citrus fruit in his mouth and a king sized Toblerone poking out of his rear end, thanks to a tragic "accident" during an uncharacteristically ambitious session of masturbation. However, for any radio DJs/popular sitcom stars it may not necessarily be quite such an astute option. Although the rather well-known gentlemen in question would have rapid access to their library of photographs, it would be important to consider the consequences were such a drive to fall into the hands of police. Without the active protection of the official secrets act (that affords royals and politicians "carte d'or" to continue to behave as they please) the police could soon be downloading their collection of photographs (undoubtedly shot by artists who were happy to play fast and loose with the popular ethos of never working with either animals or children) at the incredible rate of over 500mbs per second! While there was once a time when the sheer speed of potential evidence transfer from an SSD might have been outweighed by the high probability of being saved at the final hurdle (by a fatal drive failure) the improved reliability of this premium product would spell a most unfortunate double whammy.All in all it does come with a strong recommendation. But if you're planning on using it to store illegal filth then I'd have a good hard think about whether you've reached an adequate position in society, to be capable of employing the type of handshake associated with the 21st order of masonry.

23.2.2015

The Crucial CT500 MX200 SSD is from the company's top range and offers performance matching the highly-rated Samsung 840 pro series but at a lower price. With it in my laptop CrystalDiskMark shows sequential read and write speeds of 504.9MB/s and 482.4MB/s, which is very quick. If used to replace a conventional HDD the effect is transformative, with the computer booting in seconds and applications opening in a flash.It came with no software and no instructions, just the drive itself, a 7mm to 9.5mm spacer to aid fitting in some enclosures or bays, and an Acronis True Image HD certificate, of which more later. A utility named Crucial Storage Executive is available for download,this mostly tells you what you already know, but also gives the facility to check for and install firmware upgrades. My drive was shown as being up-to-date.I fitted the SSD in a USB3 enclosure and connected to a Lenovo G710 laptop. As I knew would be the case, Windows File Explorer could not see the drive because it does not come formatted. This is actually quick and easy to deal with if you know how, but given that no installation software is supplied I think Crucial could and should supply some instructions even if they were only printed on the box.In case it helps anyone here is the method I used to initialise the SSD with a Windows 8.1 laptop.* Right-click on the 'Start' icon (the one with four oblongs) at bottom left of the screen, and then select Disk Management from the pop-up menu.* A window then shows the existing boot drive as Disk 0 and the Crucial SSD as Disk 1. If your computer has more than one drive fitted the new SSD may show as Disk 2, Disk 3, or whatever.* In the box for the SSD, right-click on the Unallocated area and then select New Simple Volume, which will make the drive a single partition, then click Next.* The next screen invites you to choose a the volume size, you should accept the default and click Next.* You'll be asked to choose a Drive Letter, which really doen't matter, so you can accept any available letter Windows offers you.* Finally you'll be asked to choose a Volume Label (name) for the drive. This is not important, and you can change it anytime you like.* After a last click on Next formatting starts and is completed in a few seconds, which seems amazing to anyone who recalls formatting drives in the 1980's.Note that earlier versions of Windows have different drive formatting procedures.With the Crucial SSD freshly formatted and ready to go it was time to clone my existing drive.The offered True Image HD, which has to be downloaded, is a crippled version of the software with the more interesting and possibly useful features disabled unless an upgrade is purchased, and I would guess that its cost to Crucial is in the region of zero. But it does offer disk cloning, so I installed it. True Image requires a reboot before effecting disk operations, and it installs a bootloader so it can pick up where it left off when the computer restarts. I've been bitten by that bootloader before, and a quick Google search will tell you others have been, but as a dutiful reviewer I felt obliged to give it a fair try. Unfortunately it failed to load correctly at the restart whether I used UEFI or Legacy boot modes, giving an error message and dumping me at the Windows boot menu. After a couple of failed attempts I was happy to uninstall True Image and instead used the free version of Macrium Reflect, which performed the cloning operation - without any irksome reboot nonsense - in 13 minutes 34 seconds. Here I acknowledge that True Image is likely to work for most users, but be aware there are alternatives if problems are encountered.The Crucial CT500MX200SSD1 is an excellent product, one that I'm confident will give me years of good service, so I have to give it five stars. But I feel that Crucial are not offering inexperienced users the installation support warranted by the price point. Samsung, for example, supply excellent cloning software to facilitate installation of their SSD's, and also comprehensive utility software. I was supplied with a free product for review, but had I paid for it I might have felt somewhat short-changed. Still, I'm sure that tech savvy buyers will have absolutely no issues with installation and will be more than pleased with it.

28.2.2015

The MX200 is a mainstream drive and follows in the footsteps of a number of recent releases from Crucial and is the replacement model for the MX100.Being an avid gamer who also dabbles in some coding and other projects I cannot enthuse enough about SSD's and their potential to increase productivity.I've been on-board with SSD's since getting my very first 128gb SSD that cost a fortune (Crucial M4). Even then their benefits to me outweighed their cost and I truly believe these are the future.What really impressed me making the move to SSD's and indeed using this drive is the impact on just about everything,and it is truly a game changer for personal computing.Games have also started to see big benefits and I've personally seen loading times in Battlefield 3/4 drop considerably in comparison to a mechanical drive, the same goes for StarCraft 2.Windows is ready to go in seconds rather than minutes thanks to SSD's, especially so with 8.1. And laptops are faster, run for longer and less prone to critical failure if knocked about.Included in the tiny little box is the SSD and a spacer and a copy of Acronis True Image to clone your drive over. Albeit a highly nobbled version.If you intend on cloning your current drive over I recommend Macrium Reflect Free that I use personally and it is a fantastic piece of software. On that note if you are cloning from a laptop or simliar you can use an external caddy or a usb to sata cable that are easy to find online.The MX200 uses Multi Level Cell Flash Memory and a Marvell controller. When talking about SSD's they predominantly use MLC such as this one, Single Level Cell (SLC) or Toggle Level Cell (TLC).All that sounds a little confusing but I'll try and clear it up.SLC memory as the name suggests writes a single bit of information to the memory cell where as MLC writes two and TLC three. Historically SLC used to be faster, last longer and was the go to choice on the enterprise side of things. However that has started to change of late. Improvements in firmware and TRIM implementations have meant MLC is much more reliable, not to mention you can get higher density drives and thus lower cost ones. This is especially pertinent as manufacturers shift to smaller dies sizes thus increasing capacities and yields.I order to boost performance the MX200 uses tiered caching. Essentially what Crucial have done here is skimmed the top of it's main flash and called it Dynamic Write Acceleration. As you write to the drive in often little bits of information it passes through the DRAM into the DWA Cache. As the DRAM is clear it can accept more while the DWA Cache then writes down to the main NAND storage, thus increasing throughput, especially for smaller files that some SSD's struggle with.Performance wise I achieved close to the rated transfer speeds. I’m using some pretty high end hardware so speeds will vary depending on setup and application.I have been incredibly impressed with this drive and over the years Crucial as a whole. Performance is top of the range and the key thing for me is consistency. It performs exceptionally well and continues to do so without any fluctuation or deviance in doing so. My games are faster and my PC is lightning quick and I have no hesitation whatsoever in recommending this drive to enthusiasts and everyone in between who wants the best performance possible from a long standing expert in flash memory.

29.8.2015

Bought the 1TB model to replace a hard drive in a PC I use for software development. While it is expensive it was worth it to me to avoid the hassle of trying to clear enough space on the existing 1TB drive to downsize. I figure that the drive will pay for itself in terms of increased productivity, especially with software development involving disk-intensive operations.The MX200 is in Crucial's premium range but while you can save a bit elsewhere you won't find anything dramatically cheaper. It includes hardware drive encryption which you can use in conjunction with Windows Bitlocker for encrypting the drive without any significant performance penalty if you choose,and various features which the vendor says improve robustness. This translates, again according to the vendor, to a life expectancy of 1.5 million hours which is, umm, 170 years or so; and "endurance" of 320TB, that is, you can write 175GB to the drive every day for five years before it will fail. I am always sceptical but you do get three years warranty.I am more than happy with the speed. My PC is 4 years old; the pic shows my benchmark result, with up to 547 MB/s read and 507 MB/s write. This is nine to ten times faster than my previous WD Black RAID setup. The real-world difference is dramatic, with much faster boot and application start-up.A few notes. In order to upgrade a PC from a hard drive to an SSD you need several things and just buying this package might not be enough:1. A means of installing the drive. Most PCs have 3.5" drive bays so most people get a kit which lets you attach brackets to the 2.5" SSD so it will fit in a 3.5" bay. These brackets are not supplied. Since the SSD is small and light, you could also use an alternative approach; a friend has attached his to the inside of the case with Velcro.2. Cables ... you need SATA power and data. Probably your existing drive has these so you can use the same ones, unless you want both installed at once.3. A means of cloning your existing hard drive to the new one. This drive comes with a link and key to install Acronis True Image, I used this and it worked fine. Of course to do this you need both drives connected. I have a little caddy that came with a Kingston drive, that lets you connect a 2.5" drive externally via USB. You could also use an internal connection. If you have a laptop though that usually is not possible, so the caddy idea is a good one.If you are comfortable fitting an SSD you have probably thought about all this already, but worth mentioning just in case. Nothing in the box other than a spacer to fit the drive in a 2.5" slot in a laptop.Finally, if you are wondering whether going SSD is worth it, IT IS, don't hesitate.

2.4.2015

Phenomenal Performance and revives old PCs. Shame I can't give it 10 stars.I bought this direct from Crucial with the intention of eventually putting it in my wife's Apple MacBook Pro. However after reviving my old Dell laptop with this SSD I'm going to have to buy another one for her!I first tested it on an old Dell Laptop (Precision M6300 with a T9500 duo Core CPU, 4GB RAM) running Win7 64-bit, cloning an existing HDD using Acronis 2014.The results were honestly staggering and demonstrate that the real bottleneck in PC performance is the disk drive and not the CPU or RAM size. Certainly what I have proven to myself is that the SSD brings back life to old PCs,

8.12.2015

If you want the technical specs for an SSD then they have been listed by other reviewers, or crucial.When buying this HD I wanted to know- Will it fit my laptop - It will fit 99% of modern laptops (all that have a 2.5 inch spinning HD) from last 6 years or so if using a SATA interface. If you aren't sure google your laptop model and specs and you can find this information in seconds (look for SATA)- Is it hard to fit/ can I do this myself - This will depend on laptop, but again easily found via google or youtube. Most HD are easily swayed by removing a couple of small hex screws and a panel underneath. You can get an inexpensive tool kit with a magnetic screwdriver that will make loosing screws much less likely.

4.1.2017

After all the uncertainty about failure rates and brands and compression technologies, I tentatively switched to SSD some years ago. Chose Crucial, because the controller chip meant it wasn't using compression to achieve speed, but was "naturally fast". And, I've had reasonably good experiences with Crucial RAM before.Their MX hard drive does not disappoint. This is my third, to upgrade from a 256Gb drive, that was itself an upgrade from a 128Gb drive.None of them have ever let me down. Never lost any data to corruption, no "bad sectors", no drive failures. I use my PC on average 8 hours a day, seven days a week. So it gets a LOT of usage. I do spread my apps out over other drives,

7.10.2016

I've had a few of the MX200 series drives from Crucial, used in laptops and for the Xbox One in a caddy. It's worth noting that they have a new series out now though.That being said; these drives, and their newer cousins, are impressive for a few reasons.Let's simply boil it down:- The speed (excluding the 128GB) is superb. But what sets this apart from some competition is that the speed is mostly baked out of the hardware and firmware itself. This means that you don't need to install anything on the host machine to start getting some damn sweet speeds. There are faster drives out there, but they usually need software to accompany them. This is crucial (no pun intended)

19.9.2015

I've never had a Solid State Drive before and I was wondering if it would improve system boot up, speed up other things up and just do what it's supposed to do.I'm so glad I made the switch, this by the way for me was bare and nothing comes with it, it is just the drive and some adapter thing, there was no Acronis True Image HD software that other people have had. Initially this bothered me a little but, after installing and using it my disappointment disappeared as the performance outweighed that and made all this seem OK.I placed it in a caddy plugged it into a a 6Gb/s port and sat back for what I thought would be a long time for a fresh install of Windows 7.Everything happened so fast,

18.10.2015

This is the third Crucial SSD I have installed. I have previously installed 2 Crucial MX100 SSDs in laptops for other family members. MX100 was the predecessor to the MX200. All 3 have exceeded expectations, with significantly faster boot up and loading of large programs like Adobe Creative Suite. The speed benefits are noticeable during everyday use with MS Office. My old hard drive was pretty much full to capacity so the upgrade created space and relieved the speed and storage issues resulting from the hard drive being full to capacity. The Crucial SSDs have been very easy to install using the supplied cloning software, and have been installed as a direct replacement for the hard drives.

17.3.2015

I just received one today and have to say the experience has been fantastic.It actually took longer to physically install and download the bundled software than it did to clone it and get it up and running.I benchmarked it to and had similar results as others here that is to say it is fast. So very close to the stated ones and that is with half the disk in use. I didn't even turn off any programs running in the background so it was still in use at the time which is impressive.The bundled software I found really easy to use and it only took 10 mins to clone my disk. It took more than that to get it in and connected in my PC, plus download the software(rural connection).

12.6.2016

I ordered the Crucial MX200 250GB SSD along with the Sabrent USB 3.0 SSD/2.5inch SATA HDD Adapter as I am updating mymid 2009 MacbookPro. And I am very pleased so far with how this SSD has performed...recognised by my macbook no problems.I have attached the Crucial MX200 via the Sabrent Adapter to my Macbook Pro and formatted the drive(after watching various youTubevideos)! I then downloaded the OSX El Capitan Installer from App Store. Then did a clean install direct to the SSD. All ok so far!I have yet to transfer various apps and files to the SSD but I am not in a hurry to do that. I have bought an external hdd enclosure forthe macbook hdd for when I remove it....as it has about 90GB of free

3.3.2015

I have used several SSDs over the years, initially starting with a 120GB SSD that was purely for the Windows OS (leaving all program files on a separate 2TB HDD). However, at 500GB, this is the first SSD that has been my main drive without relying on an HDD for additional storage, and is in fact replacing the old 120GB SSD in my home desktop.Most people are probably aware of the difference in speed between an SSD and an HDD, but having installed Windows on 5 or 6 different SSDs, I can categorically say that this was the fastest Windows install. Start to finish was probably about 5 minutes, using a USB installation of Windows 8.1 (which is available from the Microsoft website or you can make it yourself).

10.2.2016

I'm impressed with this SSD as it has speeded up my old Dell XPS L501X laptop considerably (even with its somewhat limiting SATA2 interface...), but I was less than impressed with the Acronis software that Crucial recommend. My main gripe with Acronis is that it just seems a bit flaky - I needed two attempts before it would clone my HDD prior to installing the SSD, then I had a lot of problems with the system freezing after the SSD had been installed. I thought at first that I might have a faulty SSD but, after searching for a solution, I found that a few people suggested uninstalling the Acronis software as they'd identified this as causing the system lock-ups. Sure enough,

12.1.2018

I had errors on my MacBook laptop several times in quite a short time frame. I visited the Apple shop with the MacBook, they tested it in a few minutes and detected (I don't remember the exact description) some sort of corruption on the disk. They quoted a price to replace the hard drive with a drive of the same specification.I did some research on fitting a solid state drive to my MacBook, I found a ‘how to do it’ video on youtube. Then I looked at drives and decided on this one.I backup all my software and data regularly onto a separate hard drive using Apple Time Machine. I followed the youtube and fitted the new solid state then restored from the Time Machine backup.

Crucial MX200 2.5 - Reviews

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