Under the skin 

Firstly the bottom of the M225 is very clean indeed. Opening it up reveals the Indilinx IDX110M00-LC controller. This controller, named the Barefoot, is rated as delivering 230MBps maximum read speed and supports up to 512GB of MLC NAND. The Crucial is equipped with the LC variant of the Barefoot, basically the the same as the FC version seen in many other SSDs, but the LC versions are more cherry picked to ensure higher performance on higher capacity drives.  Having tested Samsung controllers a lot on OC3D, we're intrigued to see how the Indilinx compares, especially as this is marketed as a notebook replacement rather than a pure desktop speed machine.

Above the Indilinx controller is the Elpida 64MB SDRAM that is used as a cache to help reduce the stuttering that can occur on high speed SSDs. Naturally this will be tested later on. The RAM used is Samsung K9HCG08U1M chips. RoHs compliant lead-free chips that are multi-layered with a rated latency of 25ns. As Samsung RAM is almost ubiquitous in SSD drives and so has had a lot of development, it should definitely perform as expected.

Onwards to the notebook we're going to use for today's tests.