News - Crucial joins the high-speed SSD scene

[HEXUS]

Crucial has unveiled its flagship M225 SSD, available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities.

Read more.

[chrism]

I'm looking forward to some benchmarks between these and the Corsair 'Extreme' range... unless there are some significant speed advantages to the Corsair drives, I'd probably go for one of these, as their 64GB drive is some £70 cheaper.

[explicit4u]

im still waiting for the new intels to arrive. ill have my mind made up by around christmas.

[GaryRW]

Impressive numbers, and the drives - backed by a five-year limited warranty - are available now priced at £104.99, £201.99 and £367.99 in order of capacity

Those prices seem to be ex-vat according to Crucial's site. Less than £2 per gb though. I've set myself a £1.5 per gb cut off as long as I'm not having to pay £000's to get that ratio. I suspect I may be tempted earlier though if reviews of this (or any other drives as cheap) are good...

Any idea on which controller this is using?

& if any Hexus staff are reading this, can I suggest that you ask Crucial to supply more than just the biggest, best performing model. The manufacturers openly accept the smaller capacity drives are slower, but it would be interesting to see how much actual impact that has on both benchmarks and real world times/tests. I can understand them wanting to show off the top model, but I think a lot of people are looking to get an SSD system drive sooner rather than later, and the cheapest way of doing that will be to go with one of the smaller capacity drives.

[dangel]

There's a real gap in the market for a 64GB SSD with the same performance as 120+ drives IMHO.
64 is what i want, but i want the performance of the 120 drives (write speed wise) without the penalty of the mental price tag.

[shaithis]

Meh, makes me want to order 2 of the 120s ready for W7 RTM......and it's payday today.

Must...resist...the...urge...

[sayer]

I don't suppose anyone knows what controller this uses? I guess it doesn't matter if the drive performs well, but would be interested to give an idea from the outset. Or does Crucial have the capability to create their own controller??????

[GaryRW]

Now Intel drives apparently coming down to $225 (£135) and $440 (£270) for 80 and 160gb.

So either these drives have to be (very) good, or they need a price drop...

[bledd]

are you guys expecting one in for a review any time soon?

a huge hexus comparitive review from about 10 SSD's would be awesome

[bledd]

here's a review

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/284...isk/index.html

looks pretty solid, someone posted the link on ocuk

[Cyber-Mav]

someone needs to make an IDE ssd hard drive there are still loads of IDE laptops out there that will benefit from a SSD moreso than the newer systems released.

[Funkstar]

someone needs to make an IDE ssd hard drive there are still loads of IDE laptops out there that will benefit from a SSD moreso than the newer systems released.

I don't agree. Newer systems will benefit far more as they have faster processors, faster and more memory, better chipsets and faster drive controllers.... yet their 2.5" spindle drives probably aren't that much faster than the older IDE ones in the laptops you are speaking about.

So if you put a blindingly fast SSD in an IDE laptop, you wouldn't get the benefit as something else will easily become the bottle kneck. At least a Core2Duo with 4GB RAM and Vista 64bit will jump in performance with an SSD.

[dangel]

I don't agree. Newer systems will benefit far more as they have faster processors, faster and more memory, better chipsets and faster drive controllers.... yet their 2.5" spindle drives probably aren't that much faster than the older IDE ones in the laptops you are speaking about.

So if you put a blindingly fast SSD in an IDE laptop, you wouldn't get the benefit as something else will easily become the bottle kneck. At least a Core2Duo with 4GB RAM and Vista 64bit will jump in performance with an SSD.

Well aside from lower power consumption, robustness and reduced latency? Yes you'll bottleneck in bandwidth but the other reasons as still valid. I have seen IDE drives anyway, and if my old laptops HDD died i'd probably go with one.

[Funkstar]

Well aside from lower power consumption, robustness and reduced latency? Yes you'll bottleneck in bandwidth but the other reasons as still valid. I have seen IDE drives anyway, and if my old laptops HDD died i'd probably go with one.

Yes, all good points, and all arguments I've used in the past for using a SSD in other applications. So I don't know why I didn't think of them yesterday when reading this thread