This is a really nice drive with competitive specs, but not quite the best. The price per GB, the extra GB's in this size category along with it being made by Crucial and with a stated endurance of up to 220 TBW all add up to a great value. Some have complained that nothing comes with the drive and other than the 9mm spacer that is true, yet this is pretty much how most all drives are sold these days. The one drawback if you were hoping for a good migration tool is that they supply a key for downloading Acronis 2015 which recently was updated with patch 6613 and is now supposed to support Windows 10. I don't trust True Image any more after a simple cloning failed and corrupted my original drive.
I simply downloaded Macrium Reflect Free which is very reliable and supports Windows 10. The way that I configured my new drive may not be the fastest, but it is safe and reliable. After installing Reflect, I created a full verified system image and put a copy on an external USB 3 drive, Next I disconnected my system drive and booted up off a Rescue Media CD. The external drive containing the system image was connected to one port and the new SSD was connected to another port via a Startech USB 3 to SATA 3 cable. Fired up the restoration and 22 minutes later it completed successfully. I connected it up to an internal SATA port and it booted right up without any problems. The only other thing I did was rename the C: partition to eliminate any confusion and pulled up Disk Management and extended the primary partition to incorporate the remaining unallocated space. This drive formats out to 489.05 GB which is about 43 GB more than a formatted 480 GB drive. My method isn't the fastest way to set up the new drive, but it is extremely safe because while I am doing the image restore my original drive isn't hooked up so even if the restore failed I would still have a perfectly good system drive if needed.
In actual use it feels every bit as fast as my Samsung 850 EVO drive. I haven't tried enabling the Momentum Cache feature that allows for dynamically allocating up to 25% of idle system memory for burst writes and is supposed to nearly quadruple the speed. So far it is running very fast so I might not bother with it for now.
My experience with other Crucial drives and memory has been excellent and have never had any problems and that was a big factor in choosing this drive as reliability is more important to me than having the absolute fastest drive. I also have several Samsung drives that have performed well and have never given me any problems. A 500 GB 850 EVO carries about a 25% premium over this 525 GB drive and it just doesn't seem to be anywhere near 25% faster, in fact under normal use I don't notice any significant difference, though the Samsung will benchmark out a bit higher. Either one of these drives would have been fine, but given the extra capacity and no discernible difference in everyday use I am very satisfied with this drive. Both are very well made and reliable drives.
Update 9/24:
I have enabled Momentum Cache and it does make a noticeable difference in the overall performance. My system has 16 GB of memory which means that this can allocate up to 4 GB of unused memory for caching. The nice thing is that it will adjust the amount of memory that it utilizes dynamically according to system demands and loading so that it won't have over allocated memory at a time when the system has a higher demand for more memory. It has worked very well so far without any hiccups, and I don't notice that it is there except that everything is faster. I am running Windows 10.
| Hard Drive | 275 GB SATA |
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