Crucial Storage Executive is an official program for many Crucial Solid State Drives (SSD) to manage, tweak and monitor hard drives.
While you may use the program without any Crucial drive installed, most functionality is only available if at least one Crucial drive is installed.
The Windows 10 test system I ran the program on had two Crucial drives, a 480 Gigabyte and a 240 Gigabyte Crucial BX200 SSD, and several platter-based drives installed.
The software program is compatible with Windows 7, 8 and 10, and the Crucial drive series MX, BX, and M550 and M500.
Installation of the program is straightforward; the installer holds no surprises, and you may run a 32-bit or 64-bit version right after installation depending on which version you selected during download.
Crucial Storage Executive
The application displays information on the system and all connected hard drives on start. System information is limited to memory, the IP address and version of the operating system.
The serial number, model, capacity, temperature and firmware revision of each connected hard drive is displayed on the page as well. Firmware may not be displayed for all drives; while Crucial Storage Executive displayed the firmware for non-Crucial disks fine, it did not do so for Crucial drives but displayed “firmware not available” instead; strange.
It turns out that you need to allow the program to connect to the Internet to look up firmware information. If you don’t, you get the error.
A click on the SMART link next to a drive displays detailed information on the disk’s health status.
All main options that Storage Executive comes with are listed on the left sidebar. You may use the program to update the firmware of Crucial drives for instance. This works only if you allow the program to connect to the Internet though.
Note: make sure you create a backup of the drive before you update the firmware. A successful firmware update won’t alter data that is on the drive, but you may want to be prepared if things go wrong.
Crucial Storage Executive offers the following additional options at the time of writing:
- Sanitize Drive — This erases all data (including partitions) of the selected drive. Works only on Crucial SSD that don’t use hardware encryption. This should make any data on the drive unrecoverable. An alternative to that is the good old encrypt full drive then format (full).
- PSID Revert — This function is for SSD that use hardware encryption. It erases all data on those drives.
- Momentum Cache — Designed to improve performance, Momentum Cache will utilize up to 25% of the computer’s memory (to a maximum of 4 Gigabytes) to speed up write processes. May lead to data loss during power outages. Crucial recommends to use this only if the device has a battery or uninterruptible power supply.
- Flex Cap — Is an alternative to Over Provisioning that adjusts storage space for the controller without relying on a partition to do so. It only works with drives that support the functionality, and will erase all data on the drive when activated.
- Over Provisioning — Allocate storage space to the controller. If you select that option, Storage Executive creates a new partition on the drive that the controller will use to improve functions such as wear leveling or garbage collecting. Crucial recommends using this only in read or write heavy environments.
You may activate any option to find out if a drive supports the functionality. It is a good idea usually to create a backup before you use the program to make changes though.
Closing Words
Crucial Storage Executive is a well designed program that you may use to monitor and manage Solid State Drives. The deletion of data and firmware updating are probably the two core features of the program.
The use of RAM to improve write operations, and the enabling of over provisioning / flex cap, are two additional features that some users may find useful.
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