The Crucial/Micron M500 Review (960GB, 480GB, 240GB, 120GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 9, 2013 9:59 AM ESTPower Consumption
The M500 supports the new Device Sleep standard which will see platform support with Haswell this year. Crucial claims DIPM enabled idle power as low as 80mW, however even with DIPM enabled on our testbed we weren't able to get anything south of ~1W at idle. I'm digging to see if this is a M500 issue or one specific to our testbed, but Crucial is confident that in a notebook you'd see very little idle power consumption with the M500. Supporting DevSleep is important as that'll quickly become a must have feature for Haswell notebooks.
Load power looks excellent, which gives me hope that Crucial's idle power is indeed as good as they claim. The M500 is a direct competitor to Samsung's SSD 840 Pro when it comes to power consumption under load. Given how power efficient the 840 Pro is, the M500 is in good company.
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philipma1957 - Thursday, April 18, 2013 - link
it is all about how much you want to pay. if you buy 1 960gb micron ssds and buy a pegasus r4. with 41tb hdds you can get a very fast booting mac setup. cost is 600 + 999 or 1600. pull one 1tb hdd from the pegasus and put in the micron 960gb ssd. you have a 1tb ssd as your boot drive and 3 x 1tb hdds for storage along with a 1tb hdd as a spare.. but that is a 1600 solution pretty high costUmika - Monday, April 22, 2013 - link
I have now one of these M500 SSDs and I have actually managed to lock me out of the drive using 3rd party OPAL TCG software. Now the printed PSID comes into play: I have downloaded the Seagate SeaTools utilities for Windows to try to crypto erase the SSD, but to no avail - the SeaTools always terminate with an error message. Is there any other openly available software to try to erase or PSID revert the drive to factory settings?gzon - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
I am also experiencing problems with the OPAL encryption. Windows 8 does not seem to revert the disk back to manufactured-inactive state. Also tried PSID revert with SeaTools but it did not work. Where can I find software to PSID revert the disk?mikato - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
"the key is just stored in the controller and everything is encrypted/decrypted on the fly"What happens if the controller breaks somehow and you need data recovery? You're just screwed? Of course backing up is the best way to go but we all know not many people do that and with these large SSD sizes they'll be taking on more data and not just an OS and programs that can always be reinstalled.
odedia - Sunday, July 21, 2013 - link
I can just drool over the thought of putting two of these in my 17 inch Macbook Pro. I currently have a 128gb Intel SSD and a 500gb spinning drive. This will be a serious upgrade, and I'll be able to RAID0 them together for better performance and easier drive management.littlesandra88 - Tuesday, August 27, 2013 - link
How can an ATA BIOS password not be secure, if it changes the password (makes a new hash)?paaraa - Friday, November 29, 2013 - link
People always keep hammering about the Samsung SSD's, but did you know about the bad block issue they have? Look up the 'SSD Endurnce Experiment' (the 200TB update) at Tech Report and you will see the bad block tally of the Samsung being way up there.New Egg current (black friday) has the 480gb M500 on sale for $279, pretty good. I have two M4's (128gb) and they have been great for years now.
Gallopsu - Monday, December 23, 2013 - link
This article mentions increased performance by 25% over provisiong. Is this something that must be configured in the bios or firmware. Or is it accomplished by simply not filling it to capacity. Or should only format it to 768GB and leave the rest untouched? How can I confirm that it is actually working? Would hate to give up that space and not get the benefits.clifforama - Tuesday, January 21, 2014 - link
Have you had any response from Crucial regarding how to perform a PSID reset/revert?bogdan_kr - Thursday, January 23, 2014 - link
Yes, I would like to know that too. Crucial has not provided any information on their forums but I guess they could possibly send some more specific information to you Anand :-)