Crucial M550 512GB 2.5-Inch 7mm SSD SATA (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal Solid State Drive CT512M550SSD1..
Special Price Crucial M550 512GB 2.5-Inch 7mm SSD SATA (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal Solid State Drive CT512M550SSD1 By CrucialMost helpful customer reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
AMAZING M550
By JOHN
I just exchanged my old HDD out for this new SSD and the boot time for windows 7 went from 1.43 mins to 29 seconds. Windows performance went from 2.7 to 7.1. Waiting time is dramatically reduced. I used a disk cloning program and it was super easy. I will be ordering another one for my other laptop.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
It's like Having a New Laptop
By Thomas Stamper
Installing a laptop hard drive is not something I have any experience with. In the past I would buy an external drive for more storage rather than crank open a laptop case and risk ruining something. Because the SSD offers advantages like faster response, longer battery life, and less noise I felt that it was worth the effort. And If it didn't make enough difference in this older machine, I could still install this drive in new laptop.
The first decision I had was whether I was going to install the drive and then install Windows 7 or just clone my current drive. Honesty, I couldn't find my Windows 7 disc and the more I thought about, I'm not sure I even have more than a recovery disc for this machine. With the decision made for me, I bought Crucial's conversion kit on Amazon for less than $20. It comes with a USB that connects to your SSD drive and the software to make the clone.
The software explains the process step by step, but my power settings were forcing the Laptop into sleep mode after 20 minutes. Every time the cloning process would get hung up on the analysis stage and go no further. At first I thought I could just disable my screen saver, but I actually had to go into a Power Settings menu to disable the sleep. This advice was courtesy of the manual that I downloaded from the Apricot website, the company that created the clone software. There is no written documentation with the product and even the software CD takes you to the website. That solved the problem. 2 Hours and 55 minutes later, my 283 GB of data was cloned and I was ready to physically change the drives.
First I unscrewed the back on my HP, but the plastic wouldn't easily slip off and I felt that I might break it if I was not careful. When I went searching for a You Tube video, I quickly learned that not all HP models are built alike and I watched a half dozen before finding my configuration. As I was pulling it off I heard cracking noises that I couldn't differentiate from breakage but the good news is that it came off without damage.
It took some work to get to this point, but surprisingly the actual removal and replacement of the drive was easier than anything else I had to do in the process. Several You Tube videos explain the housing the connection and where the screws go. That part took no more than 5 minutes.
The performance has improved in three key areas. My laptop battery went from 30 minutes to 60 minutes. Start up on previous drive was 1:33 and after install it was 0:44. Microsoft Word loaded in 0:28 Before and 0:03 afterwards. What I notice the most is that the bottom is no longer hot. I hope to retire the cooling pad.
In short, I don't need to buy a new laptop, in fact, I think I would open up my older laptop and get it back into working order too.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Tested, Benchmarked, and Compared - It's Quick!
By Wayne
We already know Solid State Drives are super fast and even the slowest will easily blow away any disk drive. But just how fast is this drive when benchmarked? And how does it compare to other similar drives. Well I've got a few tested, so let's see how it did!
TEST BED
For my testing I'm using my custom built 3rd Gen i7 Workstation with an ASUS P8Z68-V PRO Motherboard running Win8.1 x64. Each drive tested was connected as a 2nd drive to the on-board Intel 6GB SATA controller. These drives were also brand new, never used. Just partitioned, quick format, and off we go with tests. The two benchmark programs are CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD. I'll be uploading benchmark results for this drive separately.
BENCHMARK EXPLANATION
Without going into too much technical detail, I'll briefly explain what I'm talking about below. A sequential test is where it simply read/writes large blocks of data that are physically adjacent to each other on the drive, one after another. Not all real-world data use will fall into this category, but half would be a reasonable assumed average. The other is the random test, where we read/write 4K or 512K (depending on test) blocks of data to various locations on the drive. This usually makes up the other half of day-to-day disk usage. Compare them back to back and you have a pretty good idea how the drive will perform in your hands.
CRUCIAL 550 (512GB)
The Crucial 550 didn't quite hit the advertised speeds, but we should note that your results will vary depending on your configuration. I'm sure Crucial's test bed was a bit more optimized than a random desktop. Sequential Read was 478MB/s and 466MB/s Write with Crystal Mark. 4K Random Read hit 25MB/s and 69MB/s Write. AS SSD had slightly lower results, but it's overall "score" was 429 for all 4 Read tests and 393 Write, with an overall benchmark score of 1047.
One odd thing was with the AS SSD Compression benchmark was that the Read/Write kept dropping by a significant amount during the test. Something that the other drives never experienced. The "real-world" AS SSD file copy test hit a speed 319 MB/s. AS SSD creates two 500MB ISO files and simply clocks the transfer rate and time it takes to copy from one place of the drive, to another.
LITE-ON LCS-512M6S
This is a popular drive, common with OEM's. CrystalDiskMark reported an impressive 518MB/s Sequential Read and 451MB/s Write. That's the fastest Sequential Read I've seen on any SSD in this system. Crucial still has a slight edge in Write here. Random 4K test was 28MB/s Read and 55MB/s Write. Lite-On takes a modest lead on Read, and Crucial easily wins with Write speeds.
AS SSD scored the Read benchmark at 446, Write at 390, for a total of 1069. Basically the Lite-On's faster Read times gave it a slight edge in the overall scoring. The compression Benchmark was also much more consistent, easily showing the fastest and most consistent times. Then we run the AS SSD "real-world" ISO test and we hit a new record of 459MB/s.
SAMSUNG PM830 (256GB SSD)
While not the absolute latest SSD, this is still a very popular and well respected solid state drive. Also common with OEM's and Retail, it shows up with various model names. In CrystalDiskMark it matched Crucial with 476MB/s sequential Read, but fell a bit short with Write at 399MB/s. 4K Random Read was also the slowest at 20MB/s and Write was 53MB/s.
AS SSD gave the overall Read score of 318, Write was 181, for a total score of 664. That's a much lower score, but you'd expect the newer model drives to have an overall edge in performance. Although the real-world ISO copy test still hit a surprising 352MB/s, actually beating the Crucial in this test.
CONCLUSION
So that's a lot of numbers. But should you care? Perhaps... perhaps not. If I test these drives back to back with real-world use, such as booting up windows, or loading up Battlefield or StarCraft 2, you'd likely have a hard time noticing much of a difference. I would have to grab a stop watch to see the fraction of a second improvements. Sure, they do add up over time, which is why you may not want to completely ignore benchmarks. And if you're comparing similarly priced drives, you're naturally going to want to grab the fastest one. Why not?
Which brings me to the main point, and that is price. As currently listed, the 512GB model isn't cheap, and the Crucial M550 isn't exactly the fastest; but compared to other similar drives out there it's actually a pretty good value. Since the price is the big factor here (which can change daily), if this one is still priced reasonably when you read this, consider it highly recommended!
Also, as noted I will be uploading additional images with benchmarks for this drive only. If you'd like more details for the other tests, please let me know and I'll post back in the comments. Thanks!
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