Crucial CT250MX200SSD1 MX200 250 GB SATA 2.5 Inch 7 mm (with 9.5 mm Adapter) Internal Solid State Drive

Wow! My i7 laptop was grinding to a halt due to a hard drive bottleneck: it was a case of starting the laptop and then going for a coffee. I've just timed how long it takes with the MX200. From pressing the power button to being on the Windows 10 desktop with the wifi announcement, less than 30 seconds. From power up to typing a google search, 50 seconds.Opening Visual Studio 2015 used to take several minutes, now it take 16 seconds!OOBE: I went for the retail pack which contains a plastic spacer and an Acronis True Image HD key. The SSD was slimmer than the old hard drive so the plastic spacer was used to obtain a snug fitting.Cloning: The first part of the installation went okay, Installed Acronis on the source drive and put the MX200 in an external drive enclosure. It took about 5 to 6 hours to clone the 480GB drive, so don't plan on using your computer for the day.Drama: My amazement at how fast everything was soon turned to disappointment when my laptop gradually became more and more unresponsive, with no drive LED illuminated but 100% disc activity showing on Windows Task Manager. I had to hold the power button down to restart. I had also noticed windows reporting a drive error, so I right clicked on the C drive -> properties -> tools ->fix drive errors and made sure to select the 'fix errors on next reboot' option. I then done a manual reboot and Windows fixed the drive errors. A few minutes later the laptop froze! After a bit of googling, I uninstalled the sata driver via Device Manager -> IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and rebooted. Windows installed the sata driver with AHCI. Five minutes later, it froze again. On Local Disk Properties I un-ticked drive indexing. From Windows services I disabled Superfetch. From Power Options -> Advanced Settings -> Hard Disk I set the sleep option to never. Rebooted and about five minutes later the laptop froze.The Fix: I googled MX200 freezing and discovered I was not alone. Crucial are using Acronis for drive cloning. When Acronis is installed on the source drive, it is naturally copied over to the new drive. Several people recommended uninstalling Acronis which I did. The laptop has not froze since.The Good: I headed over to the Crucial website and installed the Crucial Storage Executive Client. This informed me that a new firmware release was available. This was installed simply by clicking a button. I did not even have to reboot. The Executive client tells you all sorts of information about your system and SSD. Well worth having as is the new Momentum feature that uses system RAM for absorbing the spurious writes that windows seems to do. This feature reduces the number of writes to the SSD and improves life expectancy which I believe with load spreading is as good or even better than a mechanical drive, especially in a laptop where a fall can take out a spinning mechanical drive. But best of all is the speed. It really has transformed the laptop. Now the power of the i7 processor is truely unleashed. I would not ever want to go back to a mechanical drive.Would have been five stars but for the initial problems. I feel Crucial could have included a few recommendations and trouble shooting notes in their retail box.Just a note on SSD Optimization; The modern windows editions do handle SSD optimization intelligently. The ATA TRIM command is issued by windows to help the SSD garbage collector mark blocks as stale when the OS no longer needs a file because it has been deleted. You can check TRIM is enabled by entering "fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify" in a CMD window. It should return DisableDeleteNotify = 0. Modern Windows now has an optimization GUI instead of a defrag GUI and will send queued retrim commands periodically to the SSD. It will also monitor the fragmentation of the SSD if volume snapshots are enabled (System Restore). Although fragmentation does not effect SSDs like HDDs where a mechanical head had to flutter about the disc, too much fragmentation in SSDs can lead to excessive metadata processing needed to keep track of all the file fragments. So it is a balance between excessive de-fragmenting which will wear the drive and excessive fragmentation with its data overheads. In essence my research has led me to believe it is best to keep drive optimization enabled and let Windows 7/8/10 deal with it in a nuanced way.

Once upon a time I owned two computers - one aging and underpowered desktop getting ready for the scrap heap...and one all singing all dancing laptop that I may have actually have been in love with. It was good enough to handle all the resource hungry music recording and production I'd throw at it without complaint.Then, one evening after a glass of wine or two, I ended up falling on the laptop with my arm out to break my fall...that went through the screen....and just to make sure my knee and full body weight ended up crunching the laptop's most vital parts.Uninsured and too pricey to fix, this I took as a message not to be so damn materialistic about things (and cut down on booze). I had no choice but to try and make some use out of my old desktop. Basic specs are it's an Advent Core2 Duo running Vista :-(I had no more than £100 to do whatever I could to make this sluggish 8-9 yr old machine something swift, clean and capable of doing as much as it could be made to do.I've grown up with computers but I am NO expert. So I talked to as many as I could and most came up with the same suggestion. SSD drive +graphics card.I bought a standard half decent Asus Graphics Card first, popped it in and the difference was immediate. Not spectacular, but certainly an instantly more enjoyable visual experience.Then I shelled out £70 on this SSD, taking my lead from the people at Crucial who pointed out that this model had a write speed matching its read speed. Both of which, in comparison to the on board brick of a drive, were ridiculously high. So high, in fact, that I assumed it would be nothing but manufacturer spiel, and that real world experiences after installation by a geek who is nothing more than average.So next day it arrived. I simply pulled the SATA and power cables out of the old drive and popped them into the new ssd. I then ran a clean installation of Windows 10 Pro.....I can, therefore, confirm that this drive works perfectly well with Windows 10 (couldn't find this out before). It is silent, it's not gotten above luke warm yet so I don't think temp will be an issue, and it has proved itself to be THE GAMECHANGER in this PC.For me, it has made it clear that the hard drive had become the weakest point in the chain - who could blame it after so many years of use. Perhaps some clever maintenance might have boosted the speed impressively, and a clean install might have given it a real boost.However, I only have 2gb RAM and a processor that I though would need replacing. Taking pressure off the on-board graphics with a new card and increasing access speed to stored data by something like 6 to 8 times suggests to me those who just go for a new processor because of high numbers and price could well be disappointed. Most gamers I talked to seemed to have it down completely - you won't be going much faster than your slowest component.In summary, as a natural cynic (every silver lining has its loud etc), I am finding it difficult to speak so positively on the powers of a little metal box but I guess I should speak as I find. Adding the drive (and to a lesser extent the graphics card) has altered enough of the computer's capacities that I feel like I dealing with a new and modern machine.The guys at Crucial are incredibly helpful and Amazon had it with me the next day. I even asked 'if I don't see really worthwhile performance gains, can I send it back? I cannot afford, and I do not want, a £70 white elephant on my bookshelf til the end of tie'.And returning it, he said, was no problem at all. In that sense it's a no brainer. Computer slow and don't know what to do? You can send it back if it doesn't rock and roll like Crucial say....but it might even be appreciated by the boring cynic in the house :-)