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Review: Crucial
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Our readers, and almost anyone that has
searched to upgrade their spinning HDD to a much faster and more silent SSD will
have surely come across the Crucial name, but in case you've missed it you can
always visit their website and find out more about Crucial simply by clicking here.
Back in 2010 our reviewer, Wendy Robertson
did an in depth review of the Crucial
RealSSD C300, and after four years and two great drives in between, I am
referring to the Crucial
M4 and the Crucial
M500, Crucial now has a new drive, the M550. There is only one major
question to be answered here, will the new M550 keep pushing the performance
and the technology forward? From my previous experiences with Crucial I would
be very comfortable answering with a simple 'yes'. But we don't want to rush
things, so let's start by taking a look at the package, its contents, and what
there is inside the drive.
So let’s get on with the review.
Crucial M550 512GB SSD
As always I will be first examining the
packaging and its contents.
Packaging
The front of the box has a darker blue colour
and the rear of the box
The new M550 shares the same design as the
previous M500, so as you can see there isn’t anything new to report here, other
than the name of the drive and also the size which has increased from 480GB to
512GB.
A closer look at the Crucial M550 512GB SSD
Top side of the Crucial M550 SSD
Drive underside
As we can see everything is almost
identical to what we saw with the Crucial
M500 SSD, and that’s not a bad thing. Where we need have the changes is inside.
Now let’s look at what’s inside the SSD.
On
the top of the Crucial M550 we find eight NAND chips made by Micron, an M550
Marvel controller, and also a DDR3 memory chip.
On
the back of the Crucial M550 SSD we find another eight 20nm NAND chips manufactured
by Micron.
Here
is a closer look at the Micron 20nm MLC NAND.
A
close look at the eight channel Marvell 88SS9189 controller.
The
DDR3 memory is also manufactured by Micron.
Specifications
The following specifications are taken from
the official Crucial website, to find out more click here.
There are several things that caught my
attention, first are the improved read and write speeds, and next I am very
happy to see that the starting capacity is 128GB and goes as high as 1TB, other
than that we have all the nice features that Crucial provides with their SSDs,
such as RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent NAND), full AES 256-bit Hardware
Encryption, and Adaptive Thermal Protection. Crucial also promise that the
newer drive will increase your battery life by up to 50 more minutes, since the
new M550 is 94% more power efficient. The drive available in the three formats,
2.5mm (5mm and 7mm thick), mSATA, and the new M.2. All the M550s have a three
year warranty.
CrystalDiskInfo
In
the above screen shot we see all the available info for the Crucial M550 SSD.
Let’s head to the next page where we
take a look at our testing methods and the review PC.
Test machine
For this review I will be using a computer
with the following configuration:
Hardware:
- Motherboard: AsRock Z77 Extreme 4 (Intel Z68
chipset) - Processor: Intel 2nd generation
Core i5 2500K @ 4Ghz - RAM: 16GB
Crucial BallistiX Sports - GFX: Onboard Intel HD 3000
- Sound: Onboard Realtek HD audio
controller - Hard disk OS: Corsair Nova 64GB
- PSU: Corsair CX430 430W
- Display: Futsiju Siemens 22”
- Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit with
Service Pack 1
The Crucial M550 512GB SSD was connected to
the Intel native SATA 6Gbps (port 1) on the Z77 motherboard of our review PC
and all tests on the drive were carried out with the drive connected to this port.
All power saving features were disabled during all of my synthetic benchmarks.
AHCI mode was also selected for all drives
in the UEFI of our test PC, and all the tests were carried out in this mode. As
we can also see the formatted size of the Crucial M550 SSS is 477GB.
The SATA 6Gbps drivers used on our review
PC were Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) Version 11.7.0.1013.
Test applications
To test the performance of the Crucial M550
512GB SSD, I will be using the following test applications in this review.
- HD Tune
Pro - ATTO
- Iometer
- AS SSD
Benchmark - CrystalDiskMark
- Anvil’s
Storage Utilities - PCMark
Test procedures
I will start off our testing procedures
explanation by stating that I did not run many synthetic benchmarks on the Crucial
M550 SSD. You may ask why I have run so few synthetic benchmarks.
SSD technology has moved so fast in the
last couple of years, that basic synthetic benchmarks alone are now of very
limited use, as they don't really tell us much about performance and how the
drive will behave in the real world. I have therefore decided to show some
basic benchmarks for the Crucial M550 SSD, and will complement this with
advanced benchmarks using IOMeter and AS SSD benchmark. I will also show how
the Crucial M550 SSD performs in the real world.
The reality of SSD performance
While I can easily show you which SSD is
technically the faster, when you use one of these modern SSDs as an operating
system drive it becomes very difficult to tell them apart as far as performance
is concerned.
A typical use of a small capacity SSD at
the moment is to have your operating system and applications installed onto the
SSD. The performance difference compared to a traditional HDD is enormous,
however when you start to compare SSD to SSD the difference becomes almost
impossible to detect.
Let’s look at why this is the case.
Drive A can boot to the desktop in 8.11
seconds, and drive B can boot to the desktop in 8.12 seconds, the difference in
time is milliseconds, and can one really tell the difference?
The fact is, all modern SSDs are only
ticking over when they are only running the OS and launching applications, it’s
only when you get to some of the larger capacity SSDs, with enough free space
to be able to hold the actual data that you’re going to be working with, be
that video, audio or pictures, for example, that you actually get a tangible
difference in performance. This is where the SSDs with the better sequential
performance start to pull well ahead of the SSDs which have lower sequential
read/write performance.
Small file random IOPS vs sequential performance
IOPS
This is a fairly complex subject, but I
will do my best to explain things in a manner that is easy to understand.
The term IOPS is the amount of input or
output transactions that can take place in a one second interval, so for
example, if an SSD is quoted as being able to cope with 20,000 4K random write
IOPS, then the SSD should be able to cope with 20,000 input transactions in a
period of one second. If the same SSD is said to be able to produce 20,000 4K
random read IOPS, then the same SSD should be able to produce 20,000 4K random
read output transactions in a one second interval.
Ok, now we have some figures to work with,
the next question is how many IOPS are actually required?
This will depend on your usage pattern. If
you are a typical desktop user who browses the internet, does some word
processing or perhaps some audio or video editing, and perhaps plays a few
games, then in actual fact, you don’t need to have massive 4K random read/write
performance. The actual amount of 4K random performance that is required for a
fast and smooth running system for a desktop user with a usage pattern similar
to the above will be well under 1,000 4K IOPS.
On the other hand, if the SSD is being used
for running a large and complex database server, then 4K random performance is
the absolute measurement of how fast that server will run, as this type of
application does most of its input and output transactions in the 4K domain.
So why would I need an SSD with 80,000 4K
IOPS for a desktop?
In fact you don’t need this type of
performance for a desktop, but an SSD which is capable of coping with 80,000 4K
IOPS will be faster than an SSD which can only cope with 20,000 4K IOPS.
OK, I just said if under 1,000 4K IOPS are
actually required for typical desktop usage, why is an SSD with 80,000 4K IOPS
faster than an SSD with only 20,000 4K IOPS, confused?
You may ask, if I only require 1,000 4K
IOPS surely the rest is wasted?
While you may never need 80,000 4K IOPS,
IOPS is all about latency. The reason that an SSD can cope with as much as 80,000
4K IOPS is because latency in this domain is very low. With 4K files, even if
you require to process 500 of them at the same time, you are not talking about
a huge amount of data, it has far more to do with how long it takes the SSD to
process a single file, and the amount of time required to process a single 4K
is all about how long it takes for the SSD to access or store that data before
it can move on to the next transaction.
In other words an SSD with 80,000 4K IOPS
performance will handle those 500 files faster than the SSD with 20,000 IOPS.
So how will a desktop user even notice this
faster speed if so little 4K random IOPS and data are actually used?
Multitasking is a good example. The more
tasks you run at the same time, you more you will notice the speed difference.
Sequential performance
I have always maintained that sequential
performance was every bit as important as small random file performance for a
desktop SSD. Some highly regarded people on other sites found this statement
quite funny a couple of years ago when I made it, but my, how times have
changed in the world of SSD reviewing.
To me this was always so obvious for a
desktop user. For example, let’s say you want to launch an application or game.
Both have some fairly large files to load, and also a great many small files,
but the point is, even the smaller files are sequential in nature. Now let’s
say you’re into audio or video editing. Video files tend to be huge, and the
files are written or read sequentially. Isn’t this how many users are using
their PCs these days?
Summary
So how does this shape up in the real
world? Which is better, massive 4K IOPS or massive sequential performance?
In an ideal world you want both, as an SSD
with massive random 4K IOPS and sequential performance will always be faster
than an SSD that has high sequential performance and moderate 4K random IOPS
performance, and the same applies to an SSD that has massive 4K random performance
and moderate sequential performance. The SSD which has high performance in both
patterns will always be the faster SSD.
However, you can still have an SSD that is
very fast for desktop use that has moderate random 4K performance and massive
sequential performance, the same can be said about a drive having massive
random 4K performance and moderate sequential performance, as it is about
getting the balance right if you have to compromise on one or the other.
Drive preparation for running the tests
All the SSDs used in this article were in a
clean and fresh state when the testing period started. From then on, each drive
had to rely on its own NAND cleaning effectiveness for the remainder of the
tests.
- Both our spinning HDD drives were
defragged before the start of each test.
- All SSD and HDD used in this article had
their partitions aligned to the Windows 7 x64 defaults.
Where I use graphs in this article to
display results, I will use the following colours to make it easier, for our
readers to see which drive we are reviewing.
Crucial M550 512GB
SSD
Comparison SDD
Now let's head to the next page, where I
look at some basic benchmarks...
Reading Benchmarks
HD Tune
HD Tune – Sequential reading test
I present the graph below for comparison
with other recently tested drives.
Starting this set of tests with HD Tune we
can see that the Crucial M550 is faster than the M500 but not as fast as some
other drives that have need tested so far. The result is simply good.
ATTO disk benchmark
ATTO has become a standard tool for
measuring the data throughput of HDD and SSD. It measures the reading and
writing performance, using different file sizes and block sizes.
When testing the Crucial M550 SSD with ATTO
we can see that the performance is simply outstanding, close to 520MB/Sec write
and also up to 560MB/Sec when it comes to read speed, excellent result for the
M550 SSD.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0
CrystalDiskMark is quite a handy
benchmarking application, as it focuses on the file sizes that can cause a
problem on a system drive.
Crucial’s M550 SSD is showing some very
strong performance when it comes to write speeds, and also the read speeds have
been increased, especially if we compare the results with the M500. Below I am
posting two graphs that give a more detailed view of the difference between the
M500 and the newer M550 SSD.
It’s
clear that the M550 SSD has made some steps forward when it comes to read
speeds.
Write
speeds is the sector that the Crucial M550 has showed an outstanding
improvement.
Overall the performance of the Crucial M550
can be described as excellent.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD benchmark is a benchmarking tool
specifically designed to test SSDs. The application tests sequential reading and
writing performance, 4K random reading and writing performance.
AS SSD benchmark also tests 4K threaded
performance. This is very exciting, as this test is the first available test
that I am aware of, that simulates how a PC operating system actually works. A
modern PC and OS, such as Windows Vista/7 does not just run a single thread at
a time, it runs many threads. The AS SSD benchmark "4K 64Thrd" tests
run 64 threads simultaneously throughout the test. If this result is good, then
you can be pretty sure the drive will perform extremely well as a system drive.
After the tests complete, AS SSD benchmark
derives a total score for the drive being tested. This is based on all aspects
of the test results, and gives an indication of how the drive is performing
overall.
Now let’s look at the results for the Crucial
M550 SSD in the form of a screenshot. All our other comparison drives’ results
are presented in the form of a graph.
The Crucial M550 SSD continues to show
excellent performance, and in this test it is able to get second place.
Let's head to the next page and run some
tests using PCMark Vantage and PCMark 8.....
PCMark Vantage - HDD Suite
For these tests we will be using
FutureMark’s PCMark Vantage. This suite of real world test applications is
highly regarded, as one of the most comprehensive ways of testing a computer’s
performance in the real world. The PCMark Vantage test application also
includes an HDD/SSD/USB Flash suite of testing procedures, designed to fully
test out the performance of an HDD/SSD to its limits.
PCMark Vantage HDD suite results
Here
are the results for the Crucial M550 512GB SSD.
Here is a detailed view of the performance
of the Crucial M550 SSD, and you can compare the result with other drives that I
have tested.
This is a strange result, the Crucial M550
SSD is able to give much better results in all tests but for some reason the
overall score remains very low.
PC Mark 8 - HDD Suite
Here at Myce.wiki, we only recently
introduced PCMark Vantage to our SSD testing. PCMark Vantage is a good test,
but is now somewhat outdated in the applications that it tests, even to the
extent of including a test trace on how Windows Vista booted. We could have
course have opted for the newer PCMark 7, but I personally had issues with the
way it ran the HDD tests.
We have built quite a close relationship
with FutureMark software, the authors of the PCMark PC benchmarking software
that we use in our tests. I decided I would use PCMark Vantage as stopgap
measure until the more up-to-date PCMark 8 benchmarking suite became available.
I'm pleased to say that PCMark 8 is now available, and it gives me great
pleasure to introduce you all to the results obtained by this new 'real world'
benchmarking suite.
I will describe the basic way that each
test is carried out, above the graph for each test.
PC Mark 8 HDD suite results
Here
is a screenshot of the Crucial M550 SSD result.
So far the Crucial M550 SSD is the fastest
SSD that I have tested with PCMark8, the M550 reached a max speed of
293.84MB/Sec.
Another graph which gives you a more
detailed view of the performance of the Crucial M550 SSD.
Summary:
The results were very close to where I expected
them to be, the M550 SSD had no issued reaching the top in these tests.
Let's head to the next page for our
IOMeter test results.....
I/O Performance
There is little point of having an SSD
drive that has blazing sustained reading and writing speeds, if the drive can't
handle reading and writing of small random files. If you intend to use your new
SSD drive to store and run your operating system, then the drive must be able
to cope with the many small random files that Windows will write to the drive
continually. So I feel it is very important to test how many of these random
files that a drive can handle in one second. I believe that anything over 1,000
I/O’s per second would be enough for most users running a consumer grade
mainstream PC, and should provide a smooth running system. But obviously, the
more I/O's that a drive can handle, the faster the drive will feel and leave
more headroom for those huge multitasking sessions that users sometimes engage
in.
The things that I will look at are the
total I/O per second and total MB/s.
Partition alignment and sector boundaries
Windows 7 and Vista will automatically
align a partition to 4k boundaries during partition creation, Windows XP won’t.
It is imperative that an SSDs partition is aligned. Windows XP is also
restricted to sector boundaries, while Windows 7 will use 4k boundaries if it
can. The Crucial M550 is 4k boundary aware, and will use these boundaries if
possible. Of course it will also remap LBAs for compatibility with the sector
boundaries so that the drive can be used with Windows XP.
IOMeter allows us to set the sector
boundaries for conducting the tests, and I have therefore set the sector
boundaries at 4K, which means the IOMeter tests are valid for Windows 7 and
Windows Vista users. XP users will not be able to obtain such results.
I will provide a screenshot of the tests on
the review drive for those of you who like to see the actual test result. All
the comparison drive results are represented in the form of graphs.
If any of you would like to see a
screenshot from any IOMeter test on a particular drive, please feel free to
request one, and I’ll post the screenshot in the forum thread.
All the IOMeter tests create a 10GB data
set on the target drive, and each test is run for a duration of 3 minutes.
IOMeter 4K random write test with repeating data.
The first test involves creating continual
4KB random files on the target drive with IOMeter. I use a 4KB file size, as it
is believed that Windows will create and modify many of this size of file
constantly in the background during a typical Windows session. It is said that
most 4K random writes take place at a queue depth of only one.
Queue depth 1
Crucial M550 512GB SSD – 4K random write (Queue depth 1)
Queue depth 4
Crucial M550 512GB SSD (Queue depth 4)
Queue depth 32
Crucial M550 512GB SSD (Queue depth 32)
4K random write queue depth profile
For this
test I used various queue depths from 1 – 32 to give you an idea how this SSD
performs at different queue depths. For a normal desktop user, with lightweight
multitasking, the queue depth will rarely rise above 2. For heavy multitasking,
the queue depth is unlikely to rise above a value of 8.
A detailed view of the performance of the Crucial
M550 SSD with various Queue Depths.
IOMeter 4K random read test.
If there are many 4k files created, then
that must also mean that many 4k files need to be read. This test measures 4k
reading performance.
Queue depth 1
Crucial M550 512GB SSD (Queue depth 1)
Queue depth 4
Crucial M550 512GB SSD (Queue depth 4)
Queue depth 32
Crucial M550 512GB SSD (Queue depth 32)
4K random read queue depth profile.
This test
shows how the review drive scales with increasing queue depths.
Here is a more detailed view of the performance
of the Crucial M550 SSD at different Queue Depths.
IOMeter 512KB write test with repeating data.
Sequential writing performance is also very
important; in this test sequential writing performance is measured.
Crucial M550 512GB SSD 512K Sequential write with repeating data
We can clearly see that the Crucial M550
SSD is able to keep up and also gives a very good result in this test.
IOMeter 512KB read test.
This test measures 512k sequential reading
performance.
Crucial M550 512GB SSD – 512K sequential reading test
Again the Crucial M550 SSD gives a very
impressive result with sequential data, the M550 is almost at the top of the
chart.
IOMeter Workstation simulation (outstanding I/Os = 64).
When running applications you will find
that there is a mixture of small random files and larger sequential files,
being created and read. Not only that, it isn’t just one file at a time. In
this test I measure a simulated workstation pattern, with a queue depth of 64
(threaded).
Crucial M550 512GB SSD – Workstation simulation
I am not surprised by the excellent
performance of the Crucial M550 SSD in this test, the M550 very easily achieved
a speed of 368.69MB/s.
Summary
It’s no surprise that the Crucial M550 shows
excellent performance, there isn’t much to say, and the results indicate how fast
the drive behaves.
Now let’s head to the next page where we
will look at how the Crucial M550 SSD performs
using Anvil's Storage utilities....
Anvil’s Storage Utilities
As well as performing SSD endurance tests.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities has a very nice SSD benchmarking application. The SSD
benchmark tests many different aspects of SSD performance, including 4K random
at different queue depths, and also sequential performance, but more importantly
than this, all using real test data.
Another very nice feature of Anvil’s SSD
benchmark is the fact that you can change the compression levels of the test
data. The compression levels of the data sets used for the tests can be varied
from 0% compression right up to 100% compressed data, and there are even a few
data profiles already included, such as database (8%) compression, and also an
application profile (46%) compression, which is designed to simulate real
application data being read and written to the SSD.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities is still in beta
at the moment, but the application is currently solid enough to use in this
article, and I have already verified the results obtained using an SATA
analyser.
I will include a screenshot of the review
drive, and all comparison results will be presented in the form of graphs. If
you would like to see screenshots of the test results obtained on the other
SSDs in this article, you can do so by following the link here.
I will also be testing three different
compression profiles, which are as follows.
- 0 fill (100% compressible data)
- Application simulation profile (46%
compressed) - 100% (non compressible data)
So let’s begin the tests.
0 fill
Crucial M550 512GB SSD (0 fill)
Results
are ranked by highest total score.
The Crucial M550 SSD is again delivering a
top performance.
Application profile
Crucial M550 512GB SSD (application profile)
Results are ranked by highest total score.
The same story is repeated here, we see
that the Crucial M550 SSD is delivering a rock solid performance.
100% incompressible
Crucial M550 512GB SSD (100% incompressible)
Results are based on the total highest score.
Closing this set of tests, I am very happy
to see that the Crucial M550 SSD is amongst the fastest SSDs that I have tested.
Summary
You don’t need to have a crystal ball to
see the great work that Crucial has done with the M550 SSD, the drive is able
to show very consistent performance. Simply an excellently performing SSD.
Now let's head to the next page for some
real world tests....
It has become clear that simply conducting
endless benchmarks on SSD drives is pointless. Real users may run a few
benchmarks when they first fit their SSD drive, but most users just want a
drive that performs well in the real world. They want their drive to work
"out of the box" and work fast and smoothly.
Most of the latest SSD drives can deliver
very fast sustained reading and writing speeds, but these alone tell you very
little about how the drive will perform in the real world.
If you intend to use your SSD as your
primary system drive, with an operating system and applications installed and
running from the drive, real world performance becomes much more important than
just fast sequential read and write speeds, in this case I felt that it was
time to move into a different method of testing.
From now on I will only use the log files
from the Event Viewer to measure the start-up and shutdown of the system, and
also use filecopy to measure all my copy tests from a RAM disk to the selected
storage drive that I will be testing. For these tests I will also enable all
power savings features that are available, since I believe that this is the way
that the majority of the users will have them set on their PC.
Real world copy tests
I will now conduct some real world copy
tests so that you can have a much better view of how the drive will perform. In
these simple tests I try to simulate what a real user does with their drives. I
will be copying some mp3 files, various picture and MKV files, and finishing by
installing MS Office 2007.
As I said earlier from now on all my test
files will be stored in a RAM disk and copied/pasted to the destination drive
using filecopy. The filecopy utility will be used from now on for all my tests,
and I’ll be using it this way to measure the time that it takes to copy the
files.
Before I move on to the test, I want to
give you an idea on how fast your RAM is. Below you can find the results.
As
we can clearly see speed isn’t going to be an issue in these tests.
Copy tests – 259 MP3 song files (1.36GB total)
I will start this test by copying 259 MP3 files
from the RAM disk to the destination SSD, and we can see the Crucial M550 SSD gave
the best result that I have seen in this test so far, 3.31 seconds to complete
this is an outstanding result.
Copy tests – 3,377 JPEG picture files (2.56GB total)
Continuing my set of tests, and this time I
will be copying 3.377 picture files that are stored in the RAM disk to the Crucial
M550 SSD. Here the result is very good, but not as fast as I would hoped.
Copy Tests – 1 MKV and 1 SRT file (3.46GB)
Moving on to a more common task, which
involves an SRT file and also an MKV. The crucial M550 is almost one second
faster than the drive that it replaces.
WinRAR – Compressing and extracting a full DVD
For this test, I copied the contents of the
'Iron Man' movie to the hard drive, and used WinRAR to compress the movie and
also to decompress it. In WinRAR I used the store setting. Now let's see how
the Crucial M550 performs.
It’s clear that SSDs have a huge advantage
over the traditional HDDs, and it’s also clear that the Crucial M550 is a very
fast drive.
Windows start-up and closedown based on the Event Viewer
Logs
Start-up & Shutdown time
The next two screen shots were taken after I'd
installed all the drivers and all the software that I use every day. Below are
the results.
Used
state boot time in measured in milliseconds.
Used
state shutdown, again measured in milliseconds.
The Crucial M550 is the fastest drive that
I have tested so far when it comes to boot times, however this advantage is
lost when you measure the shutdown time. I would like to point out that the
times in these tests will vary from system to system and they're only here as a
reference for each drive.
Installing applications
Installing applications is possibly
something you don't do that often. But should you replace your system disk,
then you will most likely have to re-install your applications. Most of the SSD
drives I have tested up until now are quite slow at installing applications,
most likely because their I/O performance was quite limited.
For these tests, we picked some popular
applications and copied the entire contents of the CD or DVD media to the RAM disk.
We did this to make sure that the reading speed of our CD/DVD reader would not
hamper the performance of the target drive.
We then installed these applications onto
our comparison HDD drives, which were all running mirror image installations of
our Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit installation, and timed the amount of time
taken to install the application with a stopwatch on each of the drives.
MS Office 2007 Enterprise (full install)
Now let’s see
how the Crucial M550 SSD performs
with the installation of MS Office 2007 Enterprise Edition.
The procedure
followed was very simple. I copied all the files from the CD to the RAM disk and
used the virtual drive as a source for the installation files.
As I expected the Crucial M550 has no
problems giving the best result in this test.
Speed degradation after heavy testing
On this page I will measure how the SSD
performs after heavy testing and usage.
I will run an AS SSD benchmark test when
the OS is freshly installed so that we can get a good view of how the drive
performs with the OS. After that I will fill the drive up to 50% of its
capacity, use the drive for a few days, and then re-run the AS SSD benchmark.
The same procedure will be followed once again, but this time the drive will be
filled close to 90% or higher of its capacity. To finish this test, I will
simply delete all the extra data and leave the PC idle for a few hours so that
the controller has the time to perform any necessary cleaning, then see how the
drive performs.
Here is the first test run of for the M550,
when the drive has only the necessary drives and applications that I need. It’s
clear that the starting result is excellent.
After filling the drive with data up to 50%
of its capacity we can start to see a small drop in the performance of the
Crucial M550, even now though the M550 is still producing some very good
results.
It’s not a very common thing to leave less
that 4GB of free space on a drive, and for me it’s very unlike to happen. But
in the extreme case that this happens, we can get a more detailed view of the
performance that the Crucial M550 SSD will give. It’s clear that the Crucial
M550 continues to show that there is still enough speed, but it’s also clear
that there is no need to push the drive to the limit. Overall I can say that I
very happy with the result that the Crucial M550 gave.
Removing all the unnecessary files and
applications, and allowing the drive to have almost five minutes of idle state,
we can now re-run the AS SSD benchmark. Not a surprise that the Crucial M550
SSD is able to give back the outstanding speed that we have come to expect.
This concludes our review. To read the final
thoughts and conclusion, click the link below....
Conclusion:
Let us summarise the most important
positive and negative points below:
Positives:
- More power efficient.
- Excellent read speeds.
- Huge improvement in write speeds (compared
to the M500). - 7mm thick SSD, ready for Ultrabooks.
- Hardware encryption and also thermal
protection. - 7mm to 9.5mm spacer included in the box.
- Excellent TRIM operation
- 3 year warranty.
- Excellent performance as an OS drive.
Negatives:
- None worth mentioning.
To sum up, this is what I would say:
It’s always nice to see that a new drive
comes with an update in performance, and Crucial has managed to give an
improvement in read speeds, however it was even more generous with the write
speed. The part that I was more impressed with though was the performance in
the real world test. The Crucial M550 produced a top performance, and in all
the days that I used the drive everything was very snappy, with the M550 SSD
never giving the feeling that it wasn’t able to handle the workload. All this is
courtesy of the work that was done with the firmware and also the 20nm NAND.
The Crucial name and their previous
firmware support is a good reason to choose this drive, but you will also get
the typical three year warranty, and all the nice features that Crucial
provides with their SSDs. You will find hardware based encryption, thermal
protection, RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent NAND, the Crucial M550 SSD is
also more power efficient, and you can write up to 66GB daily. What more can
you ask?
Well you can ask for aggressive pricing, which
you can always check them on the Crucial website. The M550 128GB 2.5” starts €72.99
ex. VAT and the 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB are €122.99, €244.99 and €385.99 respectively,
all prices are ex. VAT. I highly recommend that you also check your local
stores for a better price. The Crucial M550 SSD is available as a 2.5” 7mm height
mSATA, and also m.2.
There isn’t anything negative to say about
the Crucial M550 SSD, but I would like to see a 5 year warranty, other than
that there isn’t anything else to complain about.
The parting sentence is:
“Crucial has continued to move forward
with their SSDs, and the M550 is a step forward from the M500. Crucial’s M550
is one very fast drive, and also it manages to keep the price very low. Try not
to overlook this excellent drive if you are looking for a new SSD.”
I therefore give the 'Excellent' rating and
the “Editor's choice” award to the Crucial M550 512GB SSD.
Thanks to:
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EFD |
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Alex Schepeljanski for |
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FutureMark for providing a
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