It’s not cheap, but the 256GB Crucial M225 is capacious enough to be the only drive in your system. That’s ideal if you’re looking to upgrade a laptop, and for desktop systems the single-drive option could help keep internal spaghetti to a minimum.
And though the up-front cost is high, at $2.75 per gigabyte the M225 is actually better value than most SSDs on the market. Sure, platter-based drives go for a tenth as much, but for what it is, the Crucial is comparatively cheap.
The real attraction, though, is performance. In our tests the M225 achieved a phenomenal 219MB/sec sequential read speed – rather more than twice the 101MB/sec achieved by a mechanical Samsung SpinPoint drive – and kept up 68MB/sec in our small-file read test while the Samsung averaged 59MB/sec.
Write performance was impressive too. Historically this is an area where SSDs have stumbled; but the M225’s 158MB/sec sequential write speed put the 94MB/sec Samsung to shame. Even when taxed with multi-threaded 4K writes the drive kept up an average rate of 13MB/sec — while its mechanical rival plummeted to just 1.1MB/sec.
In short, the M225 proved significantly faster than a mechanical drive in all of our tests; and, as you'd hope, automatic housekeeping via the TRIM command is supported, so if you use this drive with Windows 7 it should maintain its performance. That means you can expect it to provide a consistent speed boost no matter how you use your PC.
Not everyone’s wallet will stretch to a drive this size, but if you have the cash to spend, the M225’s value, plus an excellent five-year warranty, make it an unbeatable choice.
