Crucial have no doubt cornered the SSD market by offering a much better price met GB than their competitors. They by no means say they’re the best on the market, and even state it in their literature, yet their reliability, and just sheer cost make them a superb option for upgrading your storage space on your PC.

Using a traditional 1TB Samsung hard drive I have never really shown much interest in solid state drives until Crucial sent me one to review. One thing I will say now is that it’s fast. Dramatically faster than a traditional hard drive.

I kept things simple going for a standard set up I’ve seen so many users online use. My Windows 7 was installed onto the hard drive after some fiddly changes to my BIOS settings. I had to change from using an IDE connection to AHCI which in turn knocked out my optical drive. As my Windows is still on a disk so I had to use an external optical drive to get around this problem before booting into Windows. Once Windows started I plugged my optical drive back in and it worked. There are motherboards out there that have split SATA connections which will allow you to use an IDE optical drive and an AHCI SSD. You can however use the Crucial BX100 as an IDE SSD but it will lower performance so I would not recommend it.

The ‘B’ in the model number stands for budget, yet I felt hard pushed to notice any kind of flaw. I suppose that’s because I’ve not used an SSD before so I do not know the difference. Once Windows was installed it was a simple case of re-formatting my 1TB Samsung hard drive back to factory state. My ideal setup was going to be; the demanding software such as my OS and Adobe CS6 were going to be installed onto the SSD while games and documents were all going to be assigned to the 1TB Samsung drive.

Installing the software this way dramatically sped up the time it took to load software. My Windows operating system loaded in mere seconds while Photoshop opened in an instant. I am running an i7 processor as well as 8GB RAM so that helped, but compared to using my traditional HDD, this was a dream and such an easy process to install and use.

The Crucial BX100 has a true 535MB/s sequential read speed which is over 15 times faster than typical hard drives. It also has an MTF rating of 1.5 million hours and 90% more energy-efficient than a standard HDD. Crucial have aimed for reliability as well as a cheaper option on the market. Crucial have also released their MX series SSDs which provide with a slight increase in performance. You can find more information on the SSDs on the Crucial website.