Crucial CT256M225 256GB SSD

The best value solid-state drive yet?

We connected the Crucial drive to a Core i7 test bench and saw that the firmware version of the drive was 1571, which is the same version that we saw on the Patriot Torqx that we recently a little while ago.

This coincidence suggested that the two SSDs use the same controller, and a swift call confirmed that the Crucial CT256M225 does indeed use an Indilinx Barefoot controller.

HDTach 3.0.1 Throughput Results

Data throughput in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Longer bars are better

The drive's method of construction means that the SSD is necessarily quite chunky and will fit inside your laptop provided it has a 9.5mm drive bay but if it has a quarter-inch drive bay you’ll need a slimline SSD from the likes of Intel.

Crucial has used Flash chips with the same 8GB density as those in the Patriot Torqx and as the two SSDs use the same controller with the same version firmware, we expected that the two drives would behave in a similar fashion to each other.

As it happens things didn’t turn out quite that way.

Using the synthetic HD Tach 3 benchmark we got average read speeds for both drives that were effectively identical. However, the average write speed was a full 30MB/s higher for the Crucial drive.

CrystalDiskMark Results

Speeds in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Higher points are better

The situation was reversed in CrystalDiskMark 2.2 where the read speeds remained the same, but this time the Patriot had faster write speeds than the Crucial by some 20MB/s.