Crucial M550 Review: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB Models Tested
by Kristian Vättö on March 18, 2014 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
There are so many reasons why the M550 could be one of the best SSDs in the market. It has the best-in-class encryption support (along with Samsung 840 EVO) and it's also one of the only consumer-grade drives with power loss protection. Heck, it even supports DevSleep to enable low-power states in mobile platforms. Basically it has all the bells and whistles one could hope from a client drive. But there is one big "but": the performance. The M550 is supposed to be Crucial's high performance offering but compared to other high-end drives in the market, the performance is average at best. It's an upgrade over the M500, that's for sure, but that's not enough to make it to the medals podium.
The biggest Achilles' Heel of the M550 is its performance consistency. Given that it has been the focus of other manufacturers for the last year or so, it seems odd that Crucial hasn't done much to improve in this area. It's again better than the M500 consistency but compared to what SanDisk has been able to do with the same controller, the M550 doesn't impress. The potential saving grace would be pricing, so let's look there.
| NewEgg Price Comparison (3/17/2014) | ||||
| 120/128GB | 240/256GB | 480/512GB | 960GB/1TB | |
| Crucial M550 (MSRP) | $100 | $169 | $337 | $531 |
| Crucial M500 | $75 | $120 | $275 | $440 |
| Intel SSD 730 | - | $240 | $450 | - |
| Intel SSD 530 | $115 | $180 | $399 | - |
| OCZ Vector 150 | $138 | $190 | $390 | - |
| OCZ Vertex 460 | $100 | $185 | $360 | - |
| Samsung SSD 840 EVO | $95 | $160 | $265 | $554 |
| Samsung SSD 840 Pro | $119 | $208 | $420 | - |
| SanDisk Extreme II | $121 | $250 | $500 | - |
| Seagate SSD 600 | $105 | $170 | $380 | - |
The positive side is that pricing is extremely competitive. The M500 is already lowballing every other SSD in our comparison and the M550 comes in as a close second—and we expect street pricing to be lower than the MSRPs we've listed. The 840 EVO and Seagate SSD 600 are the only ones that beat the M550 in price but that's only at specific capacities (512GB) and with the current large sales that are going on. If Crucial is able to keep the pricing as competitive as our comparison suggests, other OEMs will definitely have a hard time competing with the M500 and M550.
All in all, I'm not sure how I should feel about the M550. On the one hand it feels a bit redundant to release a "high performance" drive that in reality is only average, but on the other hand, does it really matter if the price is right? I think not, but my concern is whether the M550 is fast enough to justify the added cost over the M500.
If you're a light user and price is the key purchase factor, then the M500 suffices and saves you money. However, if you're a power user and want performance, then it's better to look for the SanDisk Extreme II or Seagate SSD 600, or grab the Samsung 840 EVO 500GB on sale. The M550 kind of falls in between the two user groups and I'm not sure if there's any significant market there. For people who are not entirely sure whether the M500 is fast enough for their needs, the M550 is certainly a good and safe choice but I would have liked to see something competitive with the SanDisk Extreme II instead, even if the result was higher cost. It's not fast enough to close the gap, so the result ends up being a rehash of what we've already seen.
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catavalon21 - Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - link
On the Amazon site if you look closely, the model # listed under the 512GB version is CT256M550SSD1; that's the 256GB drive. Maybe one more reason many of us use the Egg over Amazon...IMHO only...xrror - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
regardless, the 512GB is now listed "Sign up to be notified when this item becomes available."and sorry, but Amazon is a very valid alternative to "the Egg" these days. Maybe if you're talking about the oldschool dot.com newegg of yore, but these days it's a good idea to shop around before defaulting to NewEgg.
Anyone rememember the ABS computer advertisements in Computer Shopper? Yea... old school newegg was unqualified awesome. Then sadly dot.com burst and well. At least the newegg that remains is a good company =)
catavalon21 - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
Fair enough...and regarding Computer Shopper, wow, there was more than a little grief in those pages! One of my coworkers called one of the companies with good prices, snazzy ad, and swore he heard the baby crying and the significant other yelling at the guy who answered the phone. Guess I deserved the response, but still want folks hoping to get the great deal at Amazon to read carefully.hrbngr - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
Kristian,I'm very happy w/the power loss data protection that this drive offers, as opposed to the Samsung 840 Evo, for example. Is there a more consistent, fast performer that offers similar data protection features that is also a decent value, in your opinion?
wiz329 - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
Were the graphs made using Stata?beginner99 - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
Isn't this review a bit harsh? I mean the old M500 is at leats where I live by far the cheapest ssd. Yes both the M500 and M550 don't look great in benchmarks but are there any real-life consumer scenario this will actually matter much? Especially the performance consistency seems pretty irrelevant for consumers. I'm not running a database server that is accessed like crazy. Actually my postgresql DB for development purposes runs on a WD green drive and thats just fine for that.btb - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
Agreed. The M500 have been the (seemingly unrecognized?) brandname price/performance leader for a while now, especially for those of us that like ~1TB class SSDs. Unless one wanted a crappy TLC ssd there really was no alternative, and Anandtech gave it a very lukewarm review for some reason. From all accounts the M550 seems like a roughly ~10% improvement other the original M500, so as soon as the price drops down to M500 level, its a no-brainer buy compared to the current alternatives. I also see no reason to believe Anandtechs assesment that the M550 wont take over the M500's place as soon as Crucial have phased out their stock of M500's. Its just comon sense.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
It is not our assessment that the M550 won't replace the M500, it's a statement we got straight from Micron. I even double checked after the review went live to confirm that that is really the case.The reason we gave the EVO a good review is because it did well in our tests and was the cheapest drive at the time of its release. Why wouldn't we like it in that case? TLC NAND doesn't make it "crappy" - we've shown that the endurance of TLC NAND is more than enough for client usage several times and the EVO is in fact faster than the M500 even though it uses TLC NAND.
hojnikb - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
Yeah samsungs "handpicked" TLC and MEX are really doing wonder indeed.btb - Thursday, March 20, 2014 - link
Fair enough, at the time of my purchase of 2 M500's last year, they were the only ~1TB SSDs that supported eDrive, so I did not look too closely at the EVO review. I have just glanced it over now, and I agree that it does appear to have nice specs. Although I am still skeptical about TLC, or at least you would think that if they can get that good performance from TLC, there should be plenty of room for improvement on the MLC side :)Anyway I wont be purchasing any more SSDs until they reach 2TB capacity, so seeing that Crucial just released a new generation and have yet to go past 1TB, I guess that could take a while. Perhaps Samsung with their TLC have a better chance of reaching the 2TB mark.
One area I do find Crucial slightly lagging in is on the software side. When I was running intel SSDs they had some decent software for reading the SMART attributes. And from the EVO review Samsung have some nice software as well. AFAIK Crucial dont have that, which seems like something they should correct.