Crucial 128GB SSD
6. Final words
Crucial entered the storage market with a solid state product a little bit late. However, their latest offering, the CM225 series is a nice series that could be easily compete with other established products like the Vertex series by OCZ Technology.
Both products are based on similar designs using an Indilinx controller and 64MB cache to accelerate both reading and writing operations and at the same time ensure a shutter-free environment. We can say that this design is a winning combination as many tests have showed.
Crucial bulks this product with five (5) years of warranty, more than what OCZ offers but still less than what Patriot Memory offer for their products (10 years!).
Passing to the raw performance numbers, we saw very high reading and writing speeds. You may experience a lower performance after some serious use, a behavior that tends to be typical for an SSD. Although Crucial doesn't offer any utility to fix this, you can safely use the wiper.exe utility to restore the performance of your drive. And since Windows 7 will natively support the TRIM function, you may not need to worry about such issues in the near future.
Crucial has the door opened to end-users offering an active community and hopefully will continue to improve the product with the release of frequent firmware upgrades.
We found the Crucial CT128M225 series blazing fast and highly responsive in all the tasks. The price may be somewhat higher than OCZ's solutions, but don't forget that Crucial is offering two extra years of warranty, which is very important. All-in-all, a highly suggested solution for everyone.
Positive
+ Very high reading/writing speeds according to the specs
+ Plus 2 years of warranty
+ 64MB Cache buffer permanently solves 'stuttering' problem
+ Supports RAID-0 setup
+ Works with wiper.exe utility
+ Firmware upgradable
+ Active forums and constant support with firmware upgrades
Negative
- Crucial hasn't included any jumper for firmware upgrades,
- Somewhat higher price than competition