Crucial MX300 CT525MX300SSD1 525 GB Internal SSD (3D NAND, SATA, 2.5 Inch)

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.

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).