Crucial MX300S 1TB Review

Although I have a solid state drive (SSD) already, you can never have enough storage when you have four kids. And you can’t go wrong with going for bigger and better for my Steam collection library -- I am still a gamer after all...

Coming in a nice box (as opposed to horrible blister packaging), with a 7mm to 9.5mm spacer, the only other thing is a leaflet with a code for Acronis True Image HD. It’s not the full 2015 version, but it unlocks enough of the features to clone your drive and make backups.

I decided to turn it into my gaming drive, replacing the 500GB SATA Samsung hard drive that had been in my PC since I bought it 8 years ago. It was my primary, then my spare, and now I’m worried it might fail any day -- and again, it would be good to get my games on a much faster drive.

I installed the drive on a spare SATA cable, and downloaded Acronis. I ran the clone disk feature, set it up and watched it go. It took over an hour to transfer about 400GB of data from the Samsung to the Crucial, and I really wasn’t expecting it to take that long, especially as Windows wasn’t running at the time due to it rebooting into a special boot program.

Once it was finished I had a few issues, but they were with the Samsung before I could remove it. All of the files were present and correct, so I started getting rid of the ones I didn’t really need on either drive. I now had a total of 978 GB of useable space on the MX300S, and wasn’t about to waste it on junk files.

With that out of the way, I booted up a game which I knew took quite a while to load from the old Samsung hard drive. Marvel Heroes historically loaded a splash screen about 30 seconds after hitting play on Steam, then took roughly a minute to get me to the login screen. With the MX300S installed, it now loads to the login screen in about 30 seconds. I also transferred 6.5GB in a couple of minutes from another SSD to the Crucial, which I was qute happy with.

Compared to my Kingston V300 SSD (reviewed here), I've found games load up a little faster. I wasn’t surprised, given the price difference -- I got the Kingston for £40, and the Crucial MX300 is priced at well over £250, which is to be expected given the brands and sizes involved.

Compared to my old SATA hard drive, everything loads up faster, but some games that don't are probably issues with the games--  such as Elite: Dangerous being an always-online 3D world, or at the time I had other things running in the background.

All in all, I’m happy with the Crucial MX300S. It’s sturdy enough in your hands, and perfectly fast in use. Now I just need another one to replace my spare hard drive...