crucial

The dream of a solid-state drive that offers near 1TB of storage space without breaking the bank has just come true.

Crucial today announced the availability of the M500 SSD, its first terabyte-class drive, which comes in 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB capacities and costs $129.99, $219.99, $399.99, and $599.99, respectively.

This is the first SSD on the market to offer close to 1TB at a cost close to that of most existing 480GB to 512GB SSDs.

According to Crucial, the M500 uses Micron's 20nm MLC NAND flash and Micron's custom firmware to deliver … Read more

When I finally upgraded my desktop computer's hard drive to an SSD, I nearly slapped myself for not doing it sooner. There's just something so magical about your computer booting up in less than 10 seconds, or watching games load in a blink of an eye.

Memory makers Crucial and Micron released a video that shows the manufacturing process behind the SSD, and in some ways, the speedy drive represents a work of art. … Read more

Those hoping for a chance to dine with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak will have to settle for an Apple gift card instead.

Computer memory maker Crucial today made a significant change to the grand prize in the Mac-centric contest it launched earlier this month. Instead of offering a dinner with Wozniak in San Francisco, the company said that "due to unforeseen circumstances," the new prize has been changed to a $10,000 Apple gift card.

"We apologize to our customers for the change in the grand prize, and hope entrants will understand that we were trying to … Read more

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is offering himself up for dinner -- err dinner company, that is.

Computer memory maker Crucial today launched a Mac-centric contest that gives the grand prize winner a dinner with Wozniak in San Francisco, and includes travel there and back.

First prize winners get a considerably less tasty DRAM and SSD upgrade from Crucial. The company is also offering up runner-up prizes of one or the other of those two upgrades.

The contest runs from now until June 15. In order to enter, users need to fill out a survey, which asks when Crucial parent company … Read more

Embarrassing admission of the month: before last Friday, I'd never replaced my own RAM.

Honestly, the explanation's simple: I tend to buy new laptops before I consider upgrading RAM. The last time I considered a RAM boost was probably a decade ago, and back then I paid to have it installed. I also found the idea of RAM slightly less immediately appealing. Upgrading a hard drive? Sure, lots of storage space. New processor? Faster speeds. But RAM...for many people, it might lack a certain sexiness or essential quality that justifies the upgrade.

It took my friend persistently reminding me that his RAM upgrade on the same laptop model (a late 2008 aluminum MacBook) paid huge dividends on performance to finally pull the trigger. I'm glad I did.… Read more

New year, new resolutions.

If one of your resolutions is to get a better computer so you can be happier with your life, I'd suggest you double down on exercising, or better yet add eating healthy to the list, because chances are your computer is working just fine.

What you need might just be a new internal storage device and your computer will be as good as new, or maybe even better. This is especially true if you have a system (be it a laptop or desktop, running Macs or Windows) that's 3 or 4 years old and uses an SATA hard drive as its main internal storage device. Most existing computers fit this category, by the way.… Read more

I reviewed the Crucial m4 solid-state drive a while ago and thought its performance could use some improvement. Crucial announced today that it has just released a firmware update to do just that.

The new version upgrades the drive's firmware from revision 0002 (used for the review) to revision 0009, which is slated to significantly improve the drive's throughput and overall performance. Crucial says that the new firmware will make the drive read and write faster. It will also help the computer boot and load applications even faster when used as the main drive that hosts the operating … Read more

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have always been sort of extreme. They are, for the most part, extremely fast and, unfortunately, even more extremely expensive. I wouldn't mind having one that's slightly less fast so that it could be more affordable, and the Crucial M4 just about fits that bill.

The drive performed well in our testing, though it was slower than others. Compared with traditional hard drives, however, it's still easily two or three times faster. In terms of pricing, it's the most affordable 2.5-inch SATA 3 SSD we've reviewed.

At around $440 for 256GB (… Read more

To say that high-capacity solid-state drives are getting inexpensive may be a bit premature considering you could purchase an entire MacBook Air for the price of a high-capacity SSD. That said, it could be a lot worse.

Lexar Media, an arm of solid-state drive manufacturer Micron Technology, said today that Crucial-branded m4 SSDs are now available worldwide, coming in capacities of 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB.

The 512GB model is $999--the cost of a low-end 11.6-inch Air. Now, that may seem pricey but let's not forget the good old days when high-capacity SSDs were priced in the exosphere, … Read more