When it’s comes to speed and power there is nothing better than a fast car or a powerful high end gaming PC, the last thing you want, is for your car to be compared to an old banger or your PC compared to the Console Generation. Both generations are simply behind in technology and is ultimately holding back significant advancements which could be implemented, but are not due to their limitations.
Let’s a have look at the Crucial BX100 SSD 2.5”, the first thing, it’s damn small, with it only being 7mm thick, it’s just so damn small and light, damn, I am impressed. Compared to the standard drive I currently have, this is a huge improvement, if you are wondering what I currently own this is it, 7200RPM 750GB HDD with a 256GB SSD Super Raid SSD’s (2x128GB SSD’s).
The first thing you will notice is the speed of the boot up process, not only does Windows 8.1 improve the speed of boot up already, thanks to its improved coding, having an SSD speeds it up even more, full boot up now takes less than 5secs.
My full spec of the system is as follows:
- Intel® Core™ i7-4700HQ Quad Core (2.4 GHz, Intel Haswell Architecture, Features Intel Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz)
- 3″ (MSI, 1920×1080 FULL HD Resolution, Anti-Glare, LED Backlit)
- 16GB (2x8GB DDR3)
- 256GB SSD SUPER RAID (2x128GB SSDS) + 750GB 7200RPM HDD
- Dedicated (NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 970M Graphics with 6GB GDDR5 RAM)
- Microsoft Windows 8 64-bit
So with the spec now available I hope you can see, that I am not running a generation behind and the system is well in the line to play all current and upcoming games, and the new SSD will be used to improve the system even more, within load-up times.
Boring technical stuff now:
As everyone should know, I only care about the product improving my gaming, technical rubbish needs to be kept on the technical sites that spend hours and hours running programs, so I got this from Ebuyer
‘Performance level based on comparative benchmark scores of the Crucial BX100 SSD and the Western Digital® Caviar Blue WD10EZEX internal hard drive. Actual performance levels may vary based on the benchmark used and individual system configuration. Test setup: 1TB Crucial BX100 SSD and 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue internal hard drive, both tested on an Intel® DZ87RL motherboard, Intel i7-4770K 3.50GHz processor, BIOS Rev. 0327, and Windows® 8 Pro 64-bit operating system using PCMark Vantage HDD test suite. Benchmark testing conducted December 2014.
Reliability comparison based on published MTBF ratings of the 1TB Crucial BX100 SSD (1.5 million hours) and the 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue (0.6 million hours).
Active average power use comparison based on published specs of the 500GB Crucial BX100 SSD and the 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue internal hard drive.’
- Capacity – 1TB
- Sequential Read – 535 MB/s
- Sequential Write – 450 MB/s
- 4KB Random Read – 90,000 IOPS
- 4KB Random Write – 70,000 IOPS
- Type – 2.5 inch
- Height – 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter)
- Memory Type – Micron 16nm MLC NAND
- Controller – Silicon Motion SM2246EN with Crucial Custom Firmware
- Interface – SATA 6Gbps (SATA III)
- MTTF – 1.5 million hours
- Endurance – Total Bytes Written (TBW): 72TBW, equal to 40GB per day for 5 years
- Operating Temperature – 0°C to 70°C
- Advanced Features – Thermal Monitoring, Data Path Protection, Active Garbage Collection,
- Trim Support, Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology (SMART), Error Correction Code (ECC)
- Compliance – CE, FCC, BSMI, C-Tick, VCCI, Kcc, RoHS, China RoHS, WEEE, TUV, UL, SATA-IO
Now for the juicy bit games and gaming in general, how did the SSD improve on that? Did it do anything special,did it improve load times, well? Let’s find out.
First lets see what games I will be testing this time, they have to be load heavy games, how about Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Dying Light and finally Farcry 4 all games are load heavy on an STD hard drive and can take some time to load anything.
First Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor from Warner Bros, the load time of the 7600 RPM HDD, (I used my phone counter for this) Loaded into game 20secs, load up the stage 22secs (rounded to the nearest decimal point). Now let’s look at the speed the game loads up with the SSD 8secs to load up the game and 11secs to load into the game. Now that’s 50% faster, which equals less waiting around, but not enough time to make a coffee.
Next game to be tested, Farcry 4 from Ubisoft an open world action adventure game, the load time on the STD drive was, 15 secs to load up the game, not bad I reckon, not to load into the game, 11secs. Using the SSD now I hoped to see a 50% increase in, load up times, instead I got 8secs to load up the game and 5secs to load into the game.
Now for the final game, a game that loaded pretty fast in the first place, this game was very well optimised for PC if you ask me. Dying Light again from Warner Bros, is a massive open world Zombie infested kill-a-thone, possibly one of the best Zombie games to date. Moving on to the loading times, 9secs to load up the game and 8secs to load into the game, moving to the SSD, it took a mere 3secs to load up the game and a mere 4secs to load into the game.
Overall, we get an average of a 50% increase in speed, even with loading into Windows 8 takes a blink of an eye, then you are in, everything runs and loads a lot faster that any STD drive. For a gamer speed of loading can be a great advantage in multi-player games like the new Evolve from 2K Games, the last thing you want to do, is hold up the rest due to your slow arse system load times.
I totally love this upgrade and I can see me upgrading all my STD drives to SSD in time, as the price of them are going down, lower and lower, this 1TB is currently less than £300, which to me is a bloody bargain. There are other SSD’s on the market more expensive and claim to be faster and better, However I do not know this and can not comment, there is one thing I can see, the faster they become the more expensive they become, and for this one, even though its Crucials basic SSD its damn good, with what it has to offers.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
