New vs Seasoned Crucial RealSSD 256GB

See specifications. An improved version of the Crucial M225. Has no over-provisioning.

The 256GB RealSSD is a SATA 6Gb/sec device, but as of April 2010, no Mac has such capability. It works compatibly with SATA 3Gb/sec however, which is what Macs have.

With active power consumption of 4.3 watts for writes and 2.1 watts for reads, it is a power pig, and thus a dubious choice for a laptop. Power consumption at idle is much lower at 0.094 watts, so it is still a good choice when little disk I/O occurs during normal use of the computer.

Crucial doesn’t given data reliability other than stating “Built-in EDC/ECC”, a dubious “specification”.

Performance brand-new and after seasoning

The Crucial RealSSD offers consistent and fast read performance both before and after seasoning. Top-notch for reads.

After seasoning ,write performance degrades, and develops regular “dropouts”— those steep downward spikes likely indicate performance approaching 0MB/sec for a few seconds, since each data point represents a 2.5GB file (1000 data points). Video capture will not fare well under such a scenario, frames could be dropped.

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

Average speed across the volume

*Crucial and RealSSD are trademarks of Crucial