The Crucial MX500 1TB SSD Review: Breaking The SATA Mold
by Billy Tallis on December 19, 2017 8:00 AM ESTPower Management
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled.
Idle power usage seems to have taken a step backward from the Crucial MX300 to the Crucial MX500. Both the active idle and the slumber power state consumption are higher than most mainstream SATA SSDs, but it isn't one of the extreme outliers that has broken power management.
The idle wake-up time for the Crucial MX500 of about 1ms is higher than many mainstream drives, but is a big improvement over the 3.3ms of the Crucial MX300. The Marvell-based drives from Western Digital/SanDisk seem to offer the best combination of low power consumption and quick wake-ups.
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Flunk - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
It's a shame they don't native compile it. The Oracle Java runtime is such a security problem I just don't have it installed on anything anymore.coder111 - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
What on earth are you talking about? Don't install the browser plugin- no security problem. And get JDK, not JRE. Java language or runtime environment is not a security threat in any way. Browser plugin is, but it's been obsolete for more than a decade and only used for legacy applications, and shouldn't be used at all.Wolfpup - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
I still don't want it on my system...but I'm sure I've updated firmware on Crucial drives without Java installed.smilingcrow - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Just uninstall after using the software as it's not as if you need to run an SSD utility frequently.Cooe - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
Tin foil hat alert :)erple2 - Thursday, December 28, 2017 - link
Wait, what? Unless you're compiling Java applications, or trying to profile a running Java application and want to tune jvm settings, there's no real need anymore for the jdk. The jre is more than sufficient for the vast majority of needs. The days of the jre java.exe being subpar to java.exe included in the jdk died in the 1.6 days.mode_13h - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Traditionally, you can use the Micron enterprise tool with many of these drives. They caution against it, but it works fine in at least some cases - probably the MX drives are a good bet.HardwareDufus - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
I have an OCZ-VERTEX4.. so I was looking at reviews here on AnandTech of my device to make a comparison. However, my drive was reviewed in 2012... when they used Desktop Iometer... which shows really high numbers....How do the newer testing methods at AnandTech differ from what they did in the past. Per these 2012 charts, my Vertex4 is faster.... but I know that's not the case after 5 years of progress...
mapesdhs - Saturday, December 23, 2017 - link
I've run AS-SSD, CDM, ATTO and HDTach on drives going back to the Vertex 4 (also 3, 2E, Agility 4 and Vector). I have some M.2 results to add to the archive, but here it is atm:http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/ssdtests.zip
mapesdhs - Saturday, December 23, 2017 - link
Forgot to mention, the Vertex 4 is still a good drive. Just make sure the fw is up to date. Think the latest is 1.5.