Tech Talk: Preliminary Crucial SSD Thoughts!

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So, I know I’ve mentioned a couple times recently that I received an MX200 Solid State Drive from Crucial in order to test out in my PC and offer some coverage for. Well, I wanted to go ahead and provide a bit of an update so that you guys would be kept in the loop on my initial thoughts on it as I start putting it to use.

First off, as someone that has a good amount of tech-induced OCD, I am very pleased to say that the MX200 was super easy to install and everything went without a hitch. The only “problem” was connecting it to the motherboard because I already had a fair amount of drives plugged in, but beyond that, there wasn’t anything that happened that triggered a twinge of OCD, which is great. There were no problems whatsoever getting the SSD to show up in Windows 10, so with fairly minimal work everything was up and running in no time.

Now, I should mention the fact that my OS, games, and critical apps that I want to launch swiftly were already on a Samsung EVO II SSD, and I didn’t want to have to redo the entire system configuration to test this new drive out as the OS drive. Instead, I’m using it as a secondary drive which will serve mainly as a “scratch disk” used for video recording and encoding output. Basically, since during the recording process (and encoding, too) one of the major bottlenecks to speed (or the ability to write large files) can be disk read/write speeds, a SSD is a great improvement in this regard. Preliminary use tests show that the drive can handle large volume writes quite well, and so hopefully in my follow-up article I’ll be able to go into more detail on what I found when recording or encoding files anywhere from 1080p or 1080p60 to 1440p to all the way up at 4K UHD.

So far, in terms of boot times, the SSD offers no noticeable change for my system. My Windows 10 “cold boot” and restart times were already down to a small handful of seconds from BIOS to usable desktop, and beyond the usual very tiny variances as expected, I’ve seen no change (in speed or slowness) to the boot times. However, with one of my internal drives disconnected and this one being used in its place, there was about a 1 second improvement in boot speed (as the SSD is almost immediately available whereas a 7200 RPM hard-disk has to spin up), but with all drives fully connected there’s no real change.

However, if you are going from a normal HDD (or even a higher-speed HDD) to the MX200 for your main operating system drive, you’ll likely experience a massive improvement in boot-up time.

One really nice thing of course is that this drive is 500 GB (up to 1TB is available though!) and that’s a good volume for a SSD as opposed to a smaller 128 GB drive, especially for the $139 asking price on NewEgg.

Anyway, those are my initial impressions. Stay tuned for another update in the future, and definitely check out Crucial’s homepage to see what all they offer for your storage solutions!

Jessica Brown

Retro Games and Technology Editor. She'll beat pretty much every Mega Man game without breaking a sweat.