Imation M-Class SSD Reviewed

If you’re looking to give your laptop a bit of pep, an upgrade that is becoming more common is to replace the traditional hard drive with a solid state drive, or as they are commonly known as, an SSD. Several manufacturers have jumped into the game with varying priced SSDs including Imation who sells both an M-class and an S-Class line of solid state drives. The M-class drives are the company’s performance line and Jason Dunn at Laptop Thoughts recently put an Imation M-Class to the test.

Credit Jason Dunn

The Imation M-Class SSD he reviewed came with a case to re-use your old notebook hard drive, something that is important for many users who will be switching from a hard drive of 250 to 500GB, to one that is 128GB or smaller; a fact Dunn wrestles with at the end of his review.

The primary reason for switching form a traditional hard drive, one with platters and moving parts, to an SSD, which has no moving parts, is to increase system speed. After swapping the Imation M-Class into his Dell  Vostro V13 notebook Dunn found faster start-up times and snappier system performance when scanning a large amount of files; though for some reason shutting down took longer.

As far as testing Dunn ran PCMark and HD Tune Pro and compares all of the numbers, noting improvements in the scores of PCMark and a maximum read speed of 120.8 MB/s in HD Tune Pro. While the speed was less than what is expected he admits it could be related to the low power CPU in the Vostro V13. He shares full read/write speeds for the M-Class on page two of the review.

Alongside the primary benefit of speed he also noted less heat and a lack of hard drive vibration, common issues fr thin and light notebook users. Visit Laptop Thoughts for a full review of the Imation M-Class SSD and stay tuned to Notebooks for an Intel X25 SSD Review in the near future.