32GB Crucial SSD Review

by Kevin O'Brien

Crucial has recently entered the notebook Solid State Drive (SSD) market and received fantastic reaction at this year's Consumer Electronics Show. Crucial is driving home the fact that flash-based storage drives really hold up well under stress, with things like added performance and lower power consumption being runnerup. Read on to see if you should consider purchasing one of the Crucial SSD's in this saturated market.

For this review, we tested the 32GB SSD. Crucial also offers a larger 64GB version at this time if you have a big enough wallet.

• Form factor: 2.5-inch industry-standard metal housing
• Dimensions: 100.2mm (l) x 69.85mm (w) x 9.5mm(h)
• Weight: 82g
• Available capacities: 32GB and 64GB
• Host interface: Serial ATA (SATA)
• Host data transfer rate: 3Gb/s (backwards compatible with 1.5Gb/s)
• Read/write speeds: 32GB: up to 100MB/s (read), 60MB/s (write); 64GB: up to 100MB/s (read), 35MB/s (write)
• IOPS (inputs/outputs per second): 80K sequential read IOPS for a 512-byte transfer
• Shock: 1,500G/0.5msec
• Vibration: 20G (20-2000HZ)
• Temperature: Operating (0°C to 70°C); Non-operating (-40° to 85°C)
• Acoustics: 0dB
• MTBF (mean time between failures): > 1 million hours
• Endurance: Static & Dynamic wear-leveling with 6-bit ECC error correction
• Crucial Warranty: 5 years
• MSRP: $799.99

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Build and Design

It seems that SSD manufacturers aren't going the extra mile when it comes to making the SSD as cool as possible. For spending almost half the price of your notebook on one, they might include a fancy hologram sticker across the top with "SSD" in big bold letters. The Crucial SSD is no different, making nerds scratch their heads when they look at the packaging the drive came in, and the drive itself. It really looks like something you would take off the shelf in the dollar store.

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Build quality is top notch on this drive, and Crucial is sure to make everyone know this fact. At CES they showed off the durability of this drive, with it functioning inside a shaking paint shaker. If this doesn't convince you that these drives can stand up to almost anything, I don't know what will. Personally I think your notebook would shake to bits before the drive decides to stop working. These things are like the Chuck Norris of mobile storage.

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(Video courtesy of reghardware.co.uk)

Setup

Setup is as simple as installing your operating system or other software on a standard hard drive, only faster. No additional drivers are needed; just follow the prompts during the installation. Crucial also sells an external enclosure for this drive, but any external SATA/USB enclosure for standard 2.5" hard drives will work.

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Performance

Performance is outstanding in every category. Average speeds are the best we have seen from an SSD and when combined with its low seek times; it makes for some interesting situations when playing games. When most games pause for a few seconds to load up a new section of a map, the Crucial SSD freezes for only a fraction of a second and continues working. At first I thought the game was having a glitch, but then I realized it was areas that a new section of a map was loading; instead of a game freeze it was a super fast map load.

As you can see in the performance benchmarks below, a typcial 7200rpm hard disk drive has an average read speed of about 46MB per second. The 32GB Crucial SSD consistently delivered an impressive read speed of 94MB per second! Access time (the amount of time it takes for the drive to locate data stored on the drive) is also extremely low ... making the Crucial SSD insanely fast.

Standard 7200rpm HDD (view large image)	Crucial 32GB SSD (view large image)
Standard 7200rpm HDD (view large image)	Crucial 32GB SSD (view large image)

Heat and No Noise

The Crucial SSD, not unlike every other flash-based storage device, operates without making a hint of noise. Since it has no moving parts, you will never have to worry about that annoying clicking sound under intensive hard drive activity. For those with super sensitive hearing, you won't even have to worry about the high pitched noise that a drive spinning at a few thousand RPM makes.

Thermal performance is an odd subject with the current SSD's on the market. Many manufacturers, including Crucial, claim that SSDs emit little-to-no measureable heat, as they have no moving parts. This couldn't be farther from the truth during normal operation, as they get just as hot (or hotter) than standard drives. This problem rears its head when enclosed in an external case with no airflow. Using the optional Crucial drive storage kit, the SSD and surrounding case would warm up to almost 125F after a couple of hours under constant use. While this isn't technically going to start plastic on fire or anything, it does make you wonder why they make claims that the drives are almost heat-free.

Conclusion

The Crucial 32GB SSD offers consumers another choice in the greatly expanding SSD market. Crucial is also going the extra mile to show off the ruggedness of their flash drives by operating them in one of the most severe environments possible; a paint shaker.

Considering that the Crucial SSD is also the fastest SSD we have tested to date, this level of performance makes it quite tempting to finally pull the trigger on one for my own notebook.

Pros

• Blazing Fast
• Resists strong vibrations

Cons

• Heats up quite a bit in confined areas

Pricing and Availability

The Crucial 32GB SSD ($799.99) and the Crucial 64GB SSD ($1,499.99) are both available for purchase on the Crucial website.

 

Nice review, Kevin! Though I doubt people will buy SSDs for the time being, given the small storage space. (where Vista itself takes half of it. :S)

But those speeds! Sonic would be proud.

 

At $700 or less I'd be extremely tempted to buy one of these if I had a notebook that can use two drives (one high-capactiy 7200rpm HDD and one SSD) or as another internal drive for my desktop.

 

What was the machine's temperature profile when you mounted the drive inside a system? Hotter or cooler than with a conventional drive.

The external case (where you're citing heat issues) doesn't look to have any type of cooling, passive or active and the case itself clearly isn't making an contribution. I'd want to look at the temperature in a different case that might offer some heatsinking capabilities.

Cheers,

 

When I tested a standard 2.5" drive in the same enclosed spot and played Crysis off of it for about 30 minutes it was only about 100-105F. The SSD in the same situation was much much hotter.

 

very expensive!! can't afford it

 

Nice review!

 

I wonder if this heat issue is a bigger deal than many people consider. I know SSDs are great in just about every way, but this is the first review that has made mention of extra temperature increase over a sustained period of use. Curious.

 

I'd rather wait for the price/Gb raito to drop a bit more. Plus, there's the heating issue they have to tweak.

 

A computer component that costs as much as the computer... kind of an oxymoron isn't it?

 

This would be PERFECT in my quad-core desktop as my Vista boot-drive...

The OS would be lightning quick, especially application load times, etc...

Much better to invest in this, then a WD 10K RPM harddrive as a boot drive...

 

Its Hilarious how they pack the damn thing in a blisterpack, and that to me proves that it probably cost them 6$ to manufacture it, less than you get watering a golf course per hour.

I predict a gigantic pricedrop within 5 months, and probably quadruple the GB size too.

Nice Marketing

 

so does the drive peak at 96 mb/s?
or is the bottleneck a result of the connection interface between the harddrive and the motherboard?

 

a good review to something too expensive for me to even think about buying. why did i even read it? argh!

 

The heating issue is something new which I had never noticed with the other brands through my tests. As with the bottleneck, this issue was explored and tackled earlier on in the ssd release to consumers. There are no bottlenecks any further and you can trust the advertised benchmarks will be very close to what you will get at the end of the day.

Nice review Kev! I guess this would qualify as the quickest the site has conducted although I would open the door to everyone to explore the other threads available which show higher results. They are available in the various threads in my signature block and many benchmarks are posted in the New SSD Thread.

In my opinion, the consumer is not going to really notice the difference between this (100MB/s read- 60MB/s write), the Samsung (100MB/s read - 92MB/s write), the MtronPro (115MB/s read - 76MB/s write) or even the Memoright (88MB/s read - 105MB/s write). They will see the price with the Mtron doubling that of the Crucial however.

Another interesting observation to be made is that the write speed will be noticed in the larger capacity of the crucial as it drops from 60MB/s write at 32Gb to 35MB/s write at the 64Gb capacity. This is far off from the recent comparison to the Samsung II just recently tested and I wonder if this means Crucial is utilizing multi-level NAND at the 64Gb capacity which should in turn affect the price significantly.

 

Well since these aren't found in any notebook right now (this brand/model), yes they cost almost as much as the notebook you are installing it into. Even the ones you can configure as an option bump the price up almost 50%.

 

I wonder when they'll start coming out with drives based on slower flash chips. I mean...you can pick up a 16GB USB drive for under $100 these days, why not a comparable price for a drive?

 

Thanks for the review.

I think I'll be sticking to HDD for a while longer since I like my storage to be measured in 100's of GBs. However, 16GB of this as well as the normal HDD could be a good compromise.

The heat issue is interesting. Maybe fast memory runs hotter. It would be interesting to do a back-to-back battery life test with one of these in a notebook instead of a normal HDD.

John

 

HA! That just sums it all up!

 

Why do they have to be so ridiciously expensive?

 

I believe the heat is from memories being accessed. RAM heats up when being used so SSD's are no different.

 

flash memory has a limited number of read/writes before becoming useless

SSDs may have such a limit (not sure) but if it does, it's way way higher

 

Because they are ridiculously fast.

 

I have used several different ssds in my m1330. The only heat issue I ever experience is when I am using an external monitor and the graphics card heats up. Other than that, the fan doesn't really ever come on at all.

With respect to the limited number of reads/writes, there has been alot of study with respect to this. On a slc drive (which this is), at 1 mil hr mtbf, you are looking at somewhere in the area of 100 years by the book. Lets say it conked out at 40 years...would you still be happy???

You will soon see new drives made with cheaper NAND which is termed mlc (multi level cell). These are expected to have a life span of 10 years or so but will be cheaper, larger and benchmarks will be a bit lower.

As for pricing, it will come down but is still dependent on the price of slc NAND, for the most part, and the sales being made to companies and enterprise.

We think of ssds as being new, however, they have been in use for years in business applications...at a price. In opening them up to consumers, there are alot of angles to be considered such as, well, lets face it...

If I am a company who buys ssds in quantity, why would I now want to pay business premium for the same thing at a lesser cost to consumers right? We may not think of this but it has a direct relationship on why ssds do require such a hefty price tag.

From a personal standpoint, I'm also a believer in conspiracy theories as well....So... Imagine if ssds came out at the price of hds and very available. We might see a huge market drop in hds immediately = loss of revenue and jobs and so on...

eheheheh Nuts eh?

 

I personally think that the technology is immature, not been proven reliable with time (unlike hard disk drives).

 

It seems that you never bough a high-end graphics card for your desktop

 

You're right. New technology will never go down in price. That's why we still have $5000 hard drives that hold 20 MB.