Crucial MX300 M.2 525GB SSD Review

Software: Crucial Storage Executive

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Crucial doesn’t just make great solid state drives, they also got a great piece of software to go along with it: Crucial Storage Executive. The app is a background app that will launch its interface in your default browser. That makes it easy to use for you while it is easy and quick for Crucial to maintain and update.

The first page that will open when you launch it is the general system information page which will show your local IP address, Operating System version, memory usage, and basic drive information.

From the first page, you can launch functions directly by pressing the appropriate button such as the firmware update or as seen here, the S.M.A.R.T. information of drives which support this.

You can also find detailed information about the drives such as usage, capacity, temperature, driver and firmware versions.

Updating firmware is easy enough, but my drive already has the latest version installed, so there is no need to do this.

The Sanitize function is a great way to securely wipe the content of your drive – for example, should you ever want to give it to someone else and you want to make sure that they can’t recover your old data.

The Momentum Cache function is one of the main reasons you might want to install the Storage Executive. Said with basic words, it’s a RAM disk function that will help speed up your entire system’s performance by utilizing part of your system memory as a cache. This can make a huge difference and I’ll show that on the next page.

The tool recommends that you have battery-backed powered source and that’s due to the fact that if the system should crash while data still is in the memory and before it has been flushed onto the drive itself, then you could lose that data. If your system is stable, then this shouldn’t be a problem.

The last page in the Storage Executive allows you to customize the over-provisioning of the drive. This function allows you to allocate a percentage of the SSDs free space to improve both performance and endurance. During my previous tests, I’ve kept this at zero to get a proper baseline comparison and show how the drive performs out of the box.