Conclusion

The Crucial M225 128GB was sent to us as something billed for notebook replacement and so expectations for blazing performance were minimal. It's also priced similarly to the OCZ Solid 2 series of drives and they provide around the 120MB/s speed bracket so it was yet another reason hopes weren't high. We know that Samsung produce a drive at the same price that the Crucial is marketed at, but the Samsung chips are produced in such volumes and Samsung can give themselves a good deal, that it's not really fair to compare the Indilinx equipped Crucial.

Very very quickly it became apparent that it didn't matter which drive we compared the Crucial M225 to, it would stand with its head held high. In fact any allowance we might have been willing to give it for being designed as a replacement notebook storage solution also quickly had to be dispelled.

Any drive that can provide sustained and random read speeds around 240MB/s has to be considered very seriously indeed for everyone from notebook/laptop users all the way up to the uber-performance desktop market.

It's a struggle to think of much that the Crucial doesn't do with aplomb. It's built well and looks nice. It's seriously fast and despite having only 64MB of cache at no point did we encounter any stuttering. It increased the battery life of our test notebook by around 20%, which is a massive saving in downtime and electricity from recharging. Plus, if this very high feature set wasn't enough, it's priced right down at the low end of the 128GB SSD market.

Almost entirely flawless. Our only small reservations are about the general fact that SSDs are still around £2 to the GB which is very pricey. Otherwise, it comes as highly recommended as we can recommend anything. If money is no object or you're a performance junkie, you should have stopped reading already and be off to buy one.

The Good
- Fast. Incredibly fast.
- Looks very swish.
- Huge improvement on battery life.

The Mediocre
- Packaging is perfectly fine, but not exciting.

The Bad
- As always with SSDs. Price is brutal. This is a cheap SSD, but still expensive.

Many thanks to Crucial for providing the M225 for today's review. Discuss in our forum