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
peevee - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
"SMI controllers tend to be more popular for budget products"... "Silicon Motion has been working to improve their controllers and move toward the high end, but the MX500 isn't even adopting the newer SM2259"... "but they're not as large or numerous as on previous MX series drives"race to the bottom.
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Did you look at the improved performance numbers? I'm not sure how that supports a race to the bottomWolfpup - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Ugh, is EVERYONE using TLC now? I was uncomfortable enough with MLC.I'm not crazy about switching away from Marvell either...though I suppose as long as it works and the software Micron writes is good...
I really want a higher end MLC (or SLC!) drive from Crucial/Micron.
My main system is still using a 2012 Crucial drive though. It literally launches programs in maybe 1-2 seconds MAX, so who the heck cares if it were 42x faster? (Literally the only time I've ever see it take any actual time to respond to anything was when I was doing something else while running TRIM on it for no real reason.)
But my next drive I'd like to be MLC Crucial/Micron too...
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
BX300 is your best betsmilingcrow - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Don't waste your time with SLC but look at Optane.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
That's another alternativevalinor89 - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Optane is a first gen product... I think I will pass this round and watch for the next generations .Also, Optane is not in the same price range as "conventional" SSD.
extide - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
It's a bit higher but not outrageous by any means. It's FAR cheaper than several of the early SSD's I bought in terms of $/GB. Frankly for its performance, I think it's priced pretty aggressively, TBH.DanNeely - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
SLC is dead in anything except very non-mainstream products (eg low capacity embedded flash built on a process so large that even doing ECC is optional), at only 1/3 the density of TLC per chip it's nowhere near cost competitive. The same factor is killing off MLC as 3d TLC improves. I suspect over the next year or three MLC flash will gradually fade away too.If they can get the total write count up high enough, QLC will start displacing TLC over the next few years. That number was only a few dozen writes a few years ago; I haven't seen any updates since then. OTOH over similar timespans TLC write endurance has climbed from a few hundred writes to a few thousand; if QLC has been able to improve equally we might start seeing it soon in entry level products.
jjj - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
You seem to have a negative opinion on 3D TLC for no good reason while also not requiring much perf.If your current drive is from 2012, a Crucial m4 that was fashionable back then, has 72TB endurance while the this MX500 has 360TB for the 1TB version and 180TB for the 500GB.version.