Flashing Two 64GB Crucial M225 into Vertex Turbos

[bluestang]

Note: This is for informational purposes only. I take no responsibilty for anyone doing the same thing.

I picked up 2 Crucial M225 64GB SSD drives back in November when they had their $1/GB refurbished sale. I'm switching over to a Sandy Bridge system soon and was going to ditch my RAID setup and get a new single 128GB M4 or 120GB V3 drive so I starting researching at the mfg forums and here at XS. While doing that I ran across a post at OCZ Forums about Making a Turbo from a Vertex and a Flashing Vertex to Vertex Turbo guide to do it.

Since my drives only came with a 30-day warranty, I decided to do some tinkering with them. I ran the Drive Identity Tool in the guide and both my M225's came back with 061302 meaning they were theoretically the same as the Vertex 60GB drive and could be flashed to a Vertex Turbo. After all, they both use the same Indilinx Barefoot controller and Samsung 50nm NAND.

So what the heck, I figured I’d give it a shot and see what would happen. I was more than surprized!!! Here a some before and after benches for comparison:

RAID0 before playing hacker:


Single Drive before:


Single Drives after:




RAID0 after:




Not bad of an improvement I must say . Especially on the ATTO. Not sure I will even bother upgrading my drives to the M4 or V3 now, although the 4K Randoms with the newer drives would be great. (But I probaly will anyways in the next month or 2). I'm also curious as to whether these drives will make it running at 180MHz compared to 166MHz, so I'm not sure on reliability. But hey it's not like SSD don't fail anyways .

Well, thanks for looking!

[thebad]

Pretty cool results indeed!

[MRip]

lol nice. Makes me want to go void some warranties.

[bluestang]

Yep, will definitely void warranty. And also no support then either. But this forum has Xtreme in the name for a reason! LOL

[Scubar]

Pretty interesting results, Gaining that much extra performance in the smaller sized transfers.

[zalbard]

Neat! Thanks for sharing! Any downsides? Except for warranty...

[bluestang]

Pretty interesting results, Gaining that much extra performance in the smaller sized transfers.

Smaller size tranfers performance boost was a real treat. Also, the 505 MB/s read in ATTO was pretty cool too for these little drives in RAID0.

Neat! Thanks for sharing! Any downsides? Except for warranty...

Well, only thing I can think of is whether or not these will fail running at 180MHz...the cache that is, the controller and NAND should be fine I think.

Time will tell, plus I can always flash them back to a plain old Vertex (not sure about if it will flash back to Crucial 2030 FW).

[Computurd]

coolness, very innovative!