Test Setup 

The Crucial M225 was sent to us to review as a notebook replacement storage solution, therefore we took the not too difficult decision to test using a notebook and see how much benefit a SSD can have.

Model : Compaq Presario V6500
CPU : AMD Athlon 64 X2 @ 1.9GHz
RAM : 2GB
Graphics : NVIDIA GeForce 7150M
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate
Chipset : AMD 780G
Storage on Test : Crucial M225 128GB. Western Digital 320GB

HD Tune

HD Tune is not perfect for testing Solid State Drives but there is no doubting it's capability to produce very friendly results with a wealth of information available in an easy to read format. The graphs produced are very simple to understand and if anything demonstrates the ability of an SSD to be quick no matter where the data is held, this is it. Defragmenting is a thing of the past.

Firstly we'll take a look at the graphs produced by HD tune. On the left is the Crucial M225, and on the right the WD320. As you can see the Western Digital is very poor indeed at small sizes, and only really gets up to any useful speed once we deal in 1mb chunks. It also suffers from the standard HD problem that the further to the edge of the platter you go, the slower the revolutions and therefore the slower the transfer rate.

The Crucial however is only mildly poor at 64kb, but this is a common thing with Solid State Drives, and then blazingly fast at anything above that. 240MB/s read speed on a drive marketed as a notebook one is amazing and certainly up there with the very best SSDs available.

Starting with a 64kb cluster.

And now the 512kb cluster

And finally a 1mb cluster.

Although we ran the full range of File Transfer benchmarks, the results mirrored those of the read above, so we'll show one of them to prove this, and also take a look at the random access times.

As you can see, actually accessing files matches very closely the synthetic results of the benchmarks above. Extremely small files are pretty poor on both systems but the moment the size matches something you'd actually use, the speeds plateau very quickly. With very large files the drop off on the WD320 is huge, whereas the Crucial on test today barely skips a beat.

Random access times, as would be expected from a SSD, are blazingly fast. So fast that timing them in a meaningful manner is almost impossible. It's here that the real benefits to the overall speed of your system are felt, and it made a huge difference in the usability of our Compaq Presario.

So with the synthetic benchmarks out of the way, let's take a look at some real world improvements and see if the Crucial M225 can breathe new life into your notebook.