Crucial, a leading global brand of memory and storage upgrades, today announced the immediate availability of the Crucial Ballistix Sport XT memory, which offers a new aggressively-styled, taller heat spreader design that improves thermal performance. Designed for gamers and enthusiasts looking for fast and responsive performance, Ballistix Sport XT modules offer XMP profiles for advanced speeds and timings as well as easy BIOS configuration in supported systems. “The Crucial Ballistix Sport series is designed to provide mainstream users and performance enthusiasts with a reliable, no-hassle gaming experience,” said Jeremy Mortenson, senior product manager, Crucial. “The new Sport XT memory offers an attractive new heat spreader styling for gamers who are looking for enhanced thermal performance, and a new colour that complements popular motherboards.” Available in 4GB and 8GB modules and up to 32GB quad channel kits (8GBx4), Sport XT memory offers DDR3 speeds up to 1866MHz. Crucial Ballistix Sport XT memory modules are available now at ebuyer, and dabs, or directly at www.crucial.com/uk. Crucial Ballistix memory is backed by a limited lifetime warranty and is rigorously tested to meet or exceed the high-quality performance specifications customers have come to expect from Crucial. As a brand of Micron, one of the largest manufacturers of DRAM in the world, Crucial engineers work to design, refine, test, manufacture, and support the extensive line o...

Introduction: As part of our ongoing efforts to connect with industry players in the tech world, we reached out to interview some of the premier manufacturers who might be able to educate us on various aspects of the tech industry. Recently we had the pleasure to speak with Crucial. They gave us the opportunity to hold a question and answer session on their newest technology, (like the Crucial M500 SSD). We also discussed the direction of the company, and other technologies we might see in the near future. Before we jump into the Q & A, below is a bit of history about the company itself, including a video. At Crucial.com, we know memory. We research it. Test it. Stock it. And we’ll even replace it. We’re among the first ones to get a new platform, OS, motherboard, or killer game and we waste no time putting it to the test. We sit in dark rooms reading benchmark scores. We spend hours installing and uninstalling memory modules into motherboard after motherboard… We don’t get tired. We never cut corners. We break our backs to get your upgrade out the door in a flash. And we support our products—and customers—every step of the way. Crucial.com has been serving its customers for nearly 15 years. And we use our expertise to make it easy for our customers to find the right upgrade. Our award-winning online applications—the Crucial Memory Advisor™ tool and the Crucial® System Scanner—take the guesswork out of giving new life to your computer...

Crucial started shipping its M500 line of consumer SSDs. Available in 2.5-inch SATA (7 mm-thick), mSATA, and NGFF M.2 form-factors, the drives combine Micron 20 nm MLC NAND flash with a Marvell-made processor. All three form-factors take advantage of 6 Gb/s SATA. The drive is available in 120 GB, 240 GB, and 480 GB capacities for all three form-factors, while the 2.5-inch gets a 960 GB “terabyte-class” capacity option, as well. Sequential read speeds on all capacities are as high as 500 MB/s, while sequential write speeds cap out at 130 MB/s and 250 MB/s for the 120 GB and 240 GB variants, respectively; and reach 400 MB/s on the 480 GB and 960 GB variants. The drives are backed by 3-year limited warranties, 1.2 million hours MTBF, and 72 TB total bytes written (TBW) write endurance (that’s 40 GB per day). TRIM, NCQ, and SMART are standard issue. The 120 GB, 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB variants are priced at US $129.99, $219.99, $399.99, and $599.99, respectively.

Crucial announced their new M500 SSD at CES this year, and in the wake of this excitement want to share a look at how they make them. Very cool video inside!

Crucial, a leading global brand of memory and storage upgrades, and Intel, a world leader in computing innovation, today announced the inclusion of Crucial server memory modules in the Intel Demo Depot Program. This service lends fully configured Intel Xeon-based servers to customers for evaluation and testing prior to final purchase. As a brand of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world, Crucial supplies the Intel Demo Depot Program with DDR3L registered DIMMs ranging from 8 GB to 16 GB densities, in speeds of 1600 MT/s and 1333 MT/s to support Intel’s latest generation of servers. The Intel Demo Depot Program consists of more than 200 servers and is available to interested customers throughout North America. Potential customers procure evaluation servers for 30-day periods to test equipment and proof-of-concept trials. Servers are also used by various technology manufacturers for demonstrations at tech-focused tradeshows and customer demos by Intel field account engineers. “Launching a new server architecture requires close cooperation from the entire industry,” said David L. Brown, Director of Marketing for Intel Enterprise Platforms and Services Division (EPSD). “We are pleased to be partnering with Crucial to include their memory products in the Intel Server Systems based on the Intel Xeon Processor E5 Family we lend for validation and demos. Micron is a leader in server memory technology and a great fit fo...

Micron and Crucial have released a firmware upgrade for the Micron C400/Crucial m4 and mSATA SSDs, providing multiple speed and power advancements. This upgrade is another example of the advantages of owning a Micron or Crucial SSD—end customers often benefit from the continuous improvements we roll in to win new business and meet future design requirements.   While the firmware upgrade is optional, users who elect to install this upgrade will benefit from the following enhancements:   · Faster boot-up times We improved time to ready—the sliver of time between when the power button is pressed and when the drive is ready to accept commands. · Faster TRIM We improved the efficiency of how TRIM works on the drive. · Windows 8 certification The new firmware is officially certified for the upcoming Windows 8 OS. · Better power management We increased power efficiency during standby mode, which can extend battery life significantly. The new firmware update is available now at our Firmware and Downloads section here. **UPDATE** In response to comments about systems using the new UEFI BIOS, we’d like to clarify some concerns that have been expressed by users. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a new BIOS architecture shipping with some systems. Even though our firmware code itself is compatible with systems utilizing the UEFI BIOS, we issued our original UEFI note because we noticed instances where our update tools do not recognize the SSD with som...

It's not always the enthusiasts (and well-heeled) that want blistering speeds, and certainly not just in the SSD arena. Anyone with an SSD can benefit from massive performance gains over a hard drive, from the most diehard to the budget-oriented consumer. So the Crucial v4 targets the latter, offering an SSD that's very accessible to users on a modest budget. Specifically, the v4 is limited to the SATA II 3G interface, so we're not expecting record-breaking performance results today. But at a price of $189, it's a very attractive option. Let's just say that Crucial's stated specifications for this drive turned out to be very conservative, and we were pleasantly surprised by the performance offered by the v4.

Memory speeds have been a hot topic since the release of Ivy Bridge. Ivy Bridge brings a re-worked Internal Memory Controller(IMC) that has significantly increased memory frequencies. As of the past few months, we have tested memory modules sporting speeds of up to 2800MHz. Manufacturers have been busy looking to push memory speeds off the charts and we love to see this, but reality shows that a majority of consumers do not overclock their memory. So, for those who look to increase speeds and performance beyond the norm, there is a premium to pay. Today, we have a different look at memory which we do not see as often. It is called budget memory. All the memory we tested recently with higher frequencies sells from $75 and more for 8G kits. So for anyone looking to put 16GB to 32GB in their system, let's face it, maximizing your memory capacity can be rather pricey. Not everyone wants to spend this kind of cash for memory. Enter the Crucial Ballistix Sport Series at a price of just $51.99 for an 8GB Kit!

New SSD Provides Powerful Performance in a Tiny Form Factor