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.
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StrangerGuy - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Hey let's pay >3x/GB for SLC so we can have extra drive endurance where TLC already doesn't matter for 99.999% of the target market, of course he's the smart one and rest of us are teh dumbs.10TB written over 3.5 years on my M550 1TB, yup can't wait for the drive to finally die in 300 years if it was *only* 1000 writes/bit TLC so I can buy a new one. Because TLC endurance sux amirite?
PeachNCream - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
TLC is pretty good these days compared to planar MLC from 2012. You probably wouldn't have anything to worry about since a drive like the MX500 would be obsolete before endurance becomes a problem. But if you're worried, there's the BX300 that's still for sale like MajGenRelativity suggested. Mushkin was also selling a 3D MLC drive, the Reactor Armor3D that was released in January-ish of this year. They have a 1TB model available and it uses the same Silicon Motion SM2258 controller so you'd probably see similar performance.https://www.anandtech.com/show/11035/mushkin-launc...
ddrіver - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
BS. This study proved SLC and MLC aren't actually meaningfully different. By inference TLC is good enough for almost anything. If you're the kind of person who can't do with TLC it's either overstating your usage scenarios or you're in the NAND destruction business.https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast16/technical...
mode_13h - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
I wouldn't get so hung up on # of bits per cell. What matters is performance, write endurance, and (for some use cases) power-off data retention.mode_13h - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
I'm really impressed with the QD1 random read performance of this drive. I didn't think you could achieve so many QD1 IOPS with SATA, or else Samsung probably would've done it.DoveOfTheSouth - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
The QD1 results are impressive in the tables but the charts seem to show lower figures (QD1 read: 44.7 v c. 35; write 164.2 v c. 146). Which is correct?StrangerGuy - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
The only thing that really matters is the 4K QD1 benchmark and that was extremely impressive for the asking price.shatteredx - Thursday, January 11, 2018 - link
Agreed. MX500 hard to beat for the price now.LordConrad - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
"With the MX500 arriving at $259.99 for the same capacity but with a longer warranty..."The Samsung 850 EVO and Crucial MX500 both have a 5-year warranty.
diceman2037 - Thursday, September 2, 2021 - link
Unfortuantely, what this review couldn't account for was these SSDs have a serious defect where uptimes correlate to significant increases of write amplification in comparison to their older mx300 siblings and not fit for use as an OS drive.https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/crucial-mx...