I’ve been a big fan of Samsung drives, but the price difference on the 1TB was enough to make me jump ship to Crucial. I use it in a gaming laptop as my data drive (I have a 250GB system drive and then the Crucial 1TB for data, games and applications).



The laptop is a recent (2017) MSI Apache 17”. It has space for one PCIe SSD and one standard SATA 3. I chose to go with a standard SATA because I’m lazy and didn’t want to mess about with moving the system disk.



Anyway, all good, and decent for a SSD (but not outstanding figures) in CrystalDiskMark. That is until I downloaded Crucial Storage Executive and enabled momentum cache.



The figures speak for themselves (see my screenshot of CrystalDiskMark).



I've also added a second image from Task Manager showing how momentum cache works. The G drive is a traditional HDD transferring 25GB of data to F, a 1TB SSD with momentum enabled (I'm actually installing the game Fallout 4 from G to F). You can see that the SSD only occasionally writes data (about once every 10s).



So, a very good thing about Momentum cache is the way it handles small files; it caches them to memory and only writes them to the physical SSD occasionally. This not only saves wear on your SSD, but it also makes certain tasks fly. I am a web application developer, and my build process (which involves working with literally thousands of javascript files) is now super fast (it would be even faster if node/npm was multi-threaded, but that's another story!).



What are the downsides of doing this?



Momentum cache uses your PC memory as a read/write cache, so you need to have a decent amount of memory. My laptop has 16GB, so all good there. I suspect it will work less well for 4GB systems, or if you are using a power-hungry application (such as Adobe Premiere, which I use). It also increases the CPU overhead.

EDIT: I're realised Windows 10 Task Manager > Memory shows you the RAM cache (its marked as 'memory that has to be saved to disk before it can be used for something else' or words to that effect). I copied over the full install folder of Fallout 4 plus DLCs

(29.6GB) onto a Momemtum enabled drive and the cache varied between 1 and 1.5GB. So the 4GB is never reached; more like >2GB.



Crucial strongly recommend a battery backup if you use momentum cache (i.e. you can lose the cached data on a power fail), so other things equal you should only really enable it on a laptop.



The cache is written to the real SSD on power off, so system shutdown takes longer (by 5-10s, so significant).



But yeah, just look at those figures; well recommended for laptops with memory to spare; your system flies!



Edit: Another good thing about the Crucial I'm finding is that it uses devSleep much more often than other SSDs. Since writing this review (5 months), the up-time for my SSD (according to CrystalDiskInfo) is only 9 hours when the physical up-time has been office hours (8.5 hours a day, 5 days a week). The low up-time saves both power and wear and tear, with no noticeable affect on access time. DevSleep only seems to kick in on laptops (it does not seem to affect my desktop), but is certainly something that will extend your laptop battery life (especially if you have two drives) and the life of the SSDs themselves. Oh, I also suspect the up-time is coming out so low because of Momentum Cache (RAM caching means less access requests to the SSD and more devSleep down-time), so devSleep and Momentum cache probably work together).