The Crucial MX500 1TB SSD Review: Breaking The SATA Mold
by Billy Tallis on December 19, 2017 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Crucial MX300 performs very well on the Light test with an average data rate that the MX500 cannot quite match, but the MX500 doesn't lose as much performance when the test is run on a full drive.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores of the Crucial MX500 are largely unremarkable, though the 99th percentile latency is near the high end of the normal range. The MX500 is a substantial improvement over the MX300 when it comes to full-drive performance.
The average read latency of the Crucial MX500 on the Light test is close to the Samsung 850 PRO and EVO when the test is run on an empty drive, but is merely average when the drives are full. The average write latency is a bit below average in both cases, but the full-drive penalty is much reduced compared to the MX300.
As with the average read and write latency scores, the 99th percentile read and write scores fall within the normal range. The 99th percentile read latency is a bit better than average while the 99th percentile write latency is worse than most drives, but the MX500 isn't an outlier in either direction.
The power consumption of the MX500 ranks a bit better on the Light test than it did on the Heavy test. The Crucial MX300 is still substantially better, and the slow but DRAMless Toshiba TR200 holds on to a comfortable lead. The Samsung 850 PRO and EVO are in last place.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
90 Comments
View All Comments
Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
MLC and TLC are different at die level. Once the wafer is produced it's no longer possible to switch from MLC to TLC or vice versa. Sure TLC could be used in pseudo-MLC mode by only programming the lower and middle pages, but that is not the same thing.mode_13h - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
I'm not saying you're wrong, but please explain how Crucial's Dynamic Write Acceleration gets a significant write performance benefit by doing similar.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
I'm pleased with this product. Keep up the good work Micron, and keep lowering SSD prices!jjj - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
A bit suspicious that there are no specs and prices for the 512GB version, hopefully the perf drop won't be too large.Other than that, all good here.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Officially, Crucial is only launching the 1TB model today. The other capacities have to wait a little longer for a proper announcement.The Benjamins - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
They will offically have a 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB models in 2.5" and up to 1TB in M.2http://www.crucial.com/wcsstore/CrucialSAS/pdf/pro...
witp - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Got other capacities prices, unofficialy ofc.Excl VAT, incl distributors' margin, for both M.2 and 2.5'' versions, that will be:
250GB ~74USD
500GB ~130USD
1TB ~238USD ; for comparison
2TB 2.5'' only ~465USD
Availability here in duckland ;) please don't mistake with Deutchland ;))) for W02/18
jjj - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
I supposes my comment wasn't clear enough, wasn't suggesting it's your fault. Anyway, these things are always on purpose and it seems that they don't want to talk about lower capacities at all, they want people to see the MX500 perf as it is today at 1TB. A bit of a red flag but hopefully 512GB will be ok too.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
I'm expecting them to sample at least one of the smaller capacities, if not all of them. I did mention recently that I probably would have given the BX300 an award if they had sent me the 120GB model, because that one is such a clear winner above the sparse competition in that capacity range.jjj - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
They've been doing a pretty good job with both MX and BX series, good deals usually.With the new CEO they should start pushing harder in SSD. I think they had some issues a few months back and maybe that's why this one got delayed but I would expect to see them focusing more on SSD.