Crucial M500 240gb Review

[fojacko]

Packaging

The M500 came in a simple box, with a bit of tape stopping it from opening by itself. Not the most protective of packaging, but then again, it's a light object.

 

The SSD itself came wrapped in an anti-static bag with a warning on the back just stating to use the correct precautions when handling "electrostatic sensitive devices".

 

It's also worth mentioning that the SSD came with a spacer for "9.5mm applications", personally i'm not 100% sure what this means, but I guess it's one of those things that if you need it, you know you need it.

 

 

Installation

The SSD was easy to install, it was made easier with my case (Phantom 410).

 

The SSD has 4 screws on it so that you can install it in 3.5" drive bays that support 2.5" drives, to make this even better, my case came with the screws for this.

 

There were no issues with the SSD and my bios and the windows 7 installer picked it up just fine (as you'd expect).

 

 

Speeds

Now i'm not going to go into technical numbers here, mainly because the only thing that matters is how well it performs in a real word situation.

 

The boot times are a fantastic increase from a traditional drive. Before it would take 3-5 minutes before my PC was usable, now it takes 20-40seconds. As someone who was skeptical about the per

 

 

Price

I picked this up on Amazon for £95 during black friday, but it normally costs £120. Now, would I pay £120 for it? Well, considering I was skeptical about SSD's I probably wouldn't have payed £120, but if I wasn't, there would be a high chance that I would buy it.

 

Personally, I think any SSD greater than 120gb is a bit too expensive at the moment. Once they reach the £100 mark i'd say it's come down in price enough to warrant buying one. So i'd recommend waiting to buy this SSD (and any other 240gb SSD for that matter) when it is on a sale.

 

 

Final Thoughts

I picked up this SSD for a great price and it was definently worth the £95 I spent. The performance is great for what I spent, however if you are going to spend the whole £120, I would recommend waiting for the price off SSD's to fall. The only downside is the lack of packaging, with Amazon's light packing and the lack of protection (other than a piece of plastic to stop it moving around) in the box, one big knock in transit and the SSD could easily be damaged.

[ERSCreeper]

Join the club. Awesome SSD for the price http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/78645-crucial-m500-solid-state-drive/

[Ribozyme]

20-40 seconds startup is pretty long for ssds.. 10 seconds should do it.

[ERSCreeper]

20-40 seconds startup is pretty long for ssds.. 10 seconds should do it.

Yeah, Mine boots in like 4secs.

[tezza192]

What a crap review, you havent even got benchmarks,,,,

[ERSCreeper]

What a crap review, you havent even got benchmarks,,,,

Here are my benchmarks http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/78645-crucial-m500-solid-state-drive/

[fojacko]

20-40 seconds startup is pretty long for ssds.. 10 seconds should do it.

 

I'm on windows 7 with about 3 hdd's with stuff it has to load. Also, i'm not on the latest firmware. With personal experience, the boot time doubles with win7 compared to win8. So 10-20 seconds is reasonable for win8.

 

 

What a crap review, you havent even got benchmarks,,,,

 

Benchmarks don't mean crap if it performs like shit in a real world situation. Not to be a dick, but you seem like the person who wont buy a gpu if it doesn't have the best performance in whatever synthetic benchmark it is you claim "is the best".