MX300 525GB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive - CT525MX300SSD1

Bought the 750GB drive during the Amazon Superdeals for £109 to replace a pair of 500gb RAID1 drives in my main PC rig. The drive was to be used to store all my Steam Games - essentially a games drive. Whilst no slouch, my 500GB RAID1 drives were giving me around 250MB/s and load times for my games was ok. However, with some of the newer games coming in at around 40-50GB in size my requirements changed. What i needed was: - More space - Faster loading times - Reasonable price At £109 (Amazon Superdeal), 750GB, and stated specs of 530MB/s Read and 510MB/s Write this SSD drive certainly ticked all the boxes for me. So lets get the important stuff out of the way first: What is it? It's an SSD drive that comes in a 2.5" form factor, Rated specs of 530MB/s Read and 510MB/s Write and power consumption of around 4mW. This uses the new Micron 384Gbit 3D NAND flash memory similar to what Samsung introduced a while ago with the 850 pro Formatted with NTFS leaves you with around 698GB of useable space. Interface? It uses the standard SATA interface and should work with 3Gbps/6Gbps controllers on most motherboards. How did it perform? Good. Although not top tier and does not quite compete with the best (and more expensive) drives. But then again, this drive is aimed more at mainstream user rather than the extreme or enthusiast users. In terms of my own benchmarks ATTO gave readings at around 500MB's READ and 490MB's Write which is a little below stated Crucial specs. YMMV however. As of writing the current firmware is M0CR011 and there are no updates from Crucial. Load times for games has improved, and with some the loading screen is hardly noticeable - result! Also i've noticed that the temps in my Case has dropped a few degrees - no doubt due to me removing two large 3.5" mechanical drives. Conclusion: Good capacity drive at a reasonable price. Performance is good without being outstanding and I'm hoping this will improve with firmware updates. Reliability remains to be seen but so far (6 weeks) no issues. Overall i'm happy with this drive and can recommend - You even get a code for Acronis to download and use if you need to clone or image a drive!

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).

It's my first SSD, so I am naturally impressed with the considerable improvement in boot up time and the neat, compact nature of the drive. It was easy to install in my tower (with a separately purchased 3.5" drive bay bracket and cables; the '9.5mm Adapter' that comes with this SSD is merely a hollow rectangular frame that sits underneath the SSD, I think it is only useful for laptops and I didn't use it), and the Acronis software key provided allowed me to download and use Acronis to simply transfer the contents of my hard disk drive. This transfer process took, if I remember rightly, between 30 and 40 minutes (you click through a few screens, making sure correct disks are being copied from and to, then leave it to do its thing for the vast majority of this time). I advise looking at a few videos on Youtube for instruction on physically fitting the SSD and preparing it with the software (Crucial have some of their own videos on Youtube, and videos by other SSD manufacturers and members of the public could be helpful too). Note that this SSD (and all the other ones I browsed) doesn't come with a 3.5" bracket to fit in a standard desktop drive bay, nor does it come with any cables to connect it to the power supply and motherboard. You will have to buy these items separately unless you have them already (if you keep boxes after buying a new PC, with manuals and original discs etc, check them; there are often spare cables), but they are cheap and available from lots of online retailers. As I mentioned at the start, my PC boots up faster now. It reaches the desktop screen quicker, and once there, there is no extra loading- on my HDD I would often be waiting about twenty seconds for anything to become responsive as it was still loading startup programs. I've noticed a few games load up faster too, which is nice. This performs well, no problems encountered, and at a good price. I needed a little more than 240/250 GB capacity which are the norm at this end of the scale, but didn't want to go up to 480/500GB prices.

The drive itself is highly reliable, and the improvement in performance since I upgraded from my old 1TB Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is stunning. I also got a fantastic deal by picking up the 525GB model for just £82. For an Solid State Drive (SSD) of this quality and capacity, that is incredible. There are countless articles and reviews extolling the virtues of SSDs over HDDs, so I won't repeat those again here. Instead I'll explain the reason I didn't give the product the full five stars. My short advice is, don't follow the drive's own installation instructions if you are cloning and replacing an old HDD. Do not use the Acronis software that is advised. Instead, download a free version of Macrium Reflect. It will save a huge amount of time and effort. For the technical information and the reasoning for my recommendation, read on if you don't mind a short essay! I recently also purchased a Samsung SSD, and the installation was so simple it blew me away. I plugged the new SSD into my computer with a SATA/USB adapter, installed the bundled Samsung software, and in less than 20 minutes my entire hard drive had been cloned onto the new SSD. I then simply opened the case up, swapped the two drives around, and the job was done. Installing this Crucial MX300 was nowhere near as effortless. Rather than create their own software, Crucial include within the box a product key for Acronis True Image software, that can be downloaded from the Crucial website. There are no installation instructions in the box other than to download this software and follow the "on-screen instructions". So I connected my new Crucial SSD via USB, loaded the software, selected the drive I wanted to clone, and my new SSD as the target drive. Then nothing happened. I tried a few more times without success, so I went online and spent ten minutes searching for answers. Eventually I found an explanation that in order to clone a laptop drive with Acronis, you have to physically swap the drives BEFORE the cloning, attaching the old drive externally instead. The problem with this is that Windows will not boot your laptop from a drive attached via USB. So you can't actually start Windows in order to use the software. Therefore the only way to complete the process with Acronis is to do the following: 1) Create a bootable CD or USB that you can use once your HDD is removed. 2) Remove your HDD, replace it with the new SSD. 3) Boot up your computer using the bootable created in step 1. 4) Attach the old HDD via USB. 5) Use Acronis to clone from the old drive to the new. 6) Detatch the HDD and restart, booting directly from your newly cloned SSD inside. Not only is this far more complicated than the Samsung method, but the full method is not described on any leaflets that come with the drive, nor within the Acronis True Image software. The only way I knew what to do was by searching the Acronis website for answers. Instead of messing around creating a bootable disk and following this method, I instead download the free version of Macrium Reflect. With a few tweaks, this works almost identically to the Samsung software. You load up the software whilst still using your old HDD, and it clones your disk over to an SSD connected via USB. You then swap the drives over, and the job is done. The only complication comes if you are cloning to a drive that has a smaller capacity. With the Samsung software, the cloning process adapts to this automatically (assuming your total USED disk space does not exceed the size of your new drive). With Macrium Reflect, you have to manually shrink partitions before beginning the cloning process. For example, my HDD had a C: partion of 800GB, but only 150GB was used. Macrium sees only the 800GB figure, and therefore assesses that it is too large to clone onto a 525GB SSD. I therefore shrunk my C: partition to 200GB to ensure that it would fit on the new drive. After the cloning process is complete, you are free to readjust your partition sizes as you wish.

My ageing and bruised Lenovo Z580 has been showing its age for some time. The system needed to be woken from sleep mode several minutes before I actually needed it. And whenever the message popped up that Windows needed to restart, I died a little inside, knowing how long the laptop took to reboot. Of course, it's not the most powerful laptop, but I knew what was dragging it down was the slow 5400RPM HDD. With an unexpected Amazon gift voucher coming my way, I decided it was time to sort out this little annoyance. I already own a Crucial MX100 SSD in my desktop and have been more than happy with that, so I opted for the 275GB version of the MX300. I also purchased a caddy to take out the obsolete optical drive and pop the HDD in for storage. Installation is simple enough. Crucial provide a key for Acronis cloning software so that you can clone your old installation, which may or may not save you time depending on how many applications you have on your old drive and whether you have backups of the documents elsewhere. It's worth noting that the installed capacity is 255GB (this is due to Windows and manufacturers using different measurements for capacity). 255GB, however, is ample for most of your basic programmes. If you're wanting to do my setup (SSD + HDD) you should move your Documents, Pictures, Videos and Music libraries to the HDD. So speed? Yep, as you expect from an SSD, perfectly speedy. The little Windows 10 loading dot-circle-thing scarcely manages a single rotation before Windows is logging me in. If you've been struggling through Windows startup lag, you will struggle no longer. Once you're at the desktop, you can click your web browser and it'll be loading up within seconds. Depending on the rest of your hardware, there may be a few moments of low-level lag within the first thirty seconds or so, but the fact is your system should be usable the moment you hit the desktop. And that's what you want! So, if like me, you've got an old laptop or computer that is capable of doing everything you want it to but is being dragged down by an old mechanical drive, consider this as the perfect upgrade. My Z580 still isn't going to be running Crysis on max settings anytime soon, but I no longer feel like sobbing when a restart is required. EDIT: I have since decided to plump for the 1TB version of this drive to speed up a Lenovo Y50-70 laptop. Installation was a bit tricky but only due to getting the backplate off the laptop without snapping anything! Before the SSD, my Y50 would take 2 to 3 minutes just to get to the Windows login screen. It would take a further couple of minutes to become half-way usable, and then every action seemed sluggish. Load up a folder? Slow. Load up a picture folder with lots of photos in it? That's your afternoon gone. Try and play a game? Enjoy looking at loading screens! Although I'm yet to actually play any games on it since installing the SSD (opted to do a clean installation), I can already see the phenomenal difference in usability. From power button to Windows desktop inside 25 seconds. Usable almost immediately. The problems of the past are gone for good, and this system might actually run Crysis now!

I've heard a lot about solid state drives and when this one became available, on a special prime deal, I thought it better to upgrade the hard drive, rather than pay thousands for a new laptop with the same spec. It also didn't help that my hdd was starting to generate lots of problems/errors and was clearly failing, so needed replacing. Anyway, without going into too much detail the package arrived as expected, was in a small and well protected box and came with a licence to download software to help transfer files from the old disk to the new one. There was also a small adapter/spacer that makes sure it fits snuggly in your laptop (it may not be required for all laptops). If you know what you are doing with computers then everything is very simple, the drive fitted into the mounting bracket on my laptop very easily, was screwed into place and fired up. I didn't use the software as my laptop had died by then, so I did a fresh installation of everything and all went well. I'd heard a lot about how much quicker SSD's were than conventional drives but I can honestly say that the improvement it's made is amazing. Windows boots just a second or two after turning the laptop on and all the apps I use load quicker and work so much better. File transferring is so much faster and even browsing the Internet is quicker and smoother, with sites that used to lag a bit now loading pretty much instantly. If you've got problems with your laptop, whether it's likely the hard disk is on its way out or even its just running slow, then I would seriously consider getting one of these over buying a new laptop, especially if you've got a half decent processor and/or a decent amount of RAM. If you're someone who uses your computer a lot and have considered upgrading anyway then definitely get one, it's been an amazing upgrade!

Great product at a decent price.

Hi! I bought this for my Mac Mini i7 [late 2012] 16GB on El Capitan as the original HD drive was crawling. I'd originally replaced this HD with an OCZ 480GB in 2015. Sadly, this device failed after 3 months. Worse, the Time Machine backup had failed. The 'backup' consisted of empty[!] folders for that date. On Cyber Tuesday 2016, I noticed Amazon offering this Crucial SSD for around half price - I bought it! Prompt delivery. I located and used the now well hidden Disc Utility 'clone function' via the 'Recover' menu with the SSD in an external caddy.. To check the drive I selected it as the temporary Boot Drive in 'System Preferences'. Physical installation was easier than with the OCZ. Crucial use the same iFixIT.com pages on their site as I'd used for the OCZ. You don't have to remove the internals or even the WiFi connector. Installation was also helped as the Crucial is slightly smaller than the OCZ. This lets the Crucial slip into place. A wee bit of sellotape and/or credit card can be used to retain drive while inserting screws - the fiddly bit. Results [approx] = Boot times - 45 seconds down from 1min 35 secs, Close down = 1min 30 from 2 mins. Performance in apps etc is nothing short of a revelation! USB 3 sticks open in file format immediately even as thumbnails. Office for Mac apps jump open after a short lag. Preview/Gimp/Photoshop editing = immediate. Internet eg YouTube etc - fly open and run smoothly. Only down side is that the drive capacity is a bit small, so I've had to transfer my Media files to an external drive. If you've got an old HD Drive - you need this SSD! Apparently, larger capacity newerSSDs have improved performances due to better data controllers. But for ordinary mortals, this is academic.