New vs Seasoned Crucial M225 256GB

See review and specifications. Has no over-provisioning; consumer grade. It looked reasonable a year ago and performs well in general, but my very lightly used one (travel laptop) failed completely after eight months (test unit is a brand-new one).

I have used several M225 units of 128GB and 256GB capacity, and I can no longer recommend them: one failed completely, one degraded badly and never fully recovered, and the others were test units which also degraded quickly.

Performance brand-new and after seasoning

The Crucial M225 starts out looking decent though inconsistent. Note that the rated write speed of 220MB/sec is good only in virgin state: the very 2nd fill-volume (not shown) it drops by about 15%! This behavior is true for every Crucial M225 I’ve used (4 or 5 of them). I find this misleading marketing claim completely unacceptable and at odds with reality.

After seasoning , the M225 degrades severely for writes, right down to the speed of USB 2 (about 30MB/sec)! Egads. Even reads are impaired (“With read speeds up to 250MB/s...”), the weasel phrase being “up to”. This is a pathetic performance.

In the graph below, reads are green and writes are red. The heavier line is the seasoned result.

Average speed across the volume