The Crucial MX500 500GB SSD Review: A Second Look
by Billy Tallis on February 2, 2018 9:30 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The average data rate of the Crucial MX500 on the Heavy test is barely improved over the MX300 when the test is run on an empty drive, but the full-drive performance is vastly better; the MX500 suffers very little when full. Compared to competing SSDs, the MX500 still isn't the fastest TLC SSD, but this time the Intel 545s is slower while the Samsung 850 EVO is the one that beats the MX500.
With only a few exceptions, the average and 99th percentile latencies of mainstream SATA SSDs are all in the same general range. The Crucial MX300 was one of the outliers with its poor full drive latency, but the MX500 resolves that problem.
Average read and write latency scores from the Crucial MX500 are reasonable for both the full drive and empty drive test scenarios. The MX500 is still not the fastest TLC drive, but it is never very far behind.
The Crucial MX300 had one of the worst 99th percentile read latency scores when full, but the MX500 has much better quality of service—though still marginally worse than other mainstream SATA SSDs. For 99th percentile write latencies, the MX300's full-drive problems weren't as severe as those suffered by competitors like the ADATA SU800, but the MX500 still straightens things out and ends up scoring better than the MLC-based BX300.
Energy usage for the MX500 over the course of the Heavy test has regressed compared to the MX300, but this only brings the MX500 in line with the rest of the mainstream TLC competition. Full-drive energy consumption is slightly higher than the other recent drives.
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jordanclock - Friday, February 2, 2018 - link
Generally, any good SATA SSD is going offer much the same performance as any other model. The gains when going from the second (or even fifth) best SSD on SATA to the absolute best are tiny. Plus, given the capacity you would want for a console, I think going for a 'mediocre' SSD will offer all the performance you need without spending twice as much for less than one second load time differences.leexgx - Tuesday, February 20, 2018 - link
this is true once you have a SSD (any) in a console your purely limited by the CPU speed and ram in the PS4 or xbox it self (some youtubers have tested it) even to the point the SSHD from seagate and toshiba after the second load is nearly the same as a SSD (but it has to have read the data before so if you load the same game or save twice for it work well witch mite happen if you die a lot and fall back to a checkpoint save) if you switch between games SSHDs can at times offer not as much benerfitstill can't beat SSDs for consistency as it always be the same speed
tamalero - Friday, February 2, 2018 - link
Those prices feel really nice!Hurr Durr - Sunday, February 4, 2018 - link
It's not nice until we hit around 10 cents for the gigabyte.zirk65 - Friday, February 2, 2018 - link
Looks similar to the MX200, but with bigger pipes and better thermals.MX200 = MLC NAND / Marvel Controller
MX500 = TLC NAND / Silicon Motion Controller
Yet I wonder much is different between the controller uArch these days, outside of specific I/O and power functions.
mode_13h - Friday, February 2, 2018 - link
Last I checked, Crucial's MX-series SSDs featured end-to-end data protection. Does Samsung offer anything like that, in their consumer drives?letmepicyou - Friday, February 2, 2018 - link
Say Mr. Tallis, I'm sure I'm not alone when I ask this (feel free to chime in, guys) but there are those of us out here who want the greater capacity of a 1tb drive whilst not wanting to fork over 1tb drive prices. I can RAID 0 a pair of ~500gb drives and get better performance than a single 1tb drive, while spending $60-$120 less.What I'm saying is, I would love to see how your arsenal of ~500 gb drives perform in RAID. I have a feeling others would like to see the same information.
Billy Tallis - Friday, February 2, 2018 - link
You can't get a pair of 500GB drives for $60 less than the price of a 1TB drive from the same product line, unless you're looking at an unusually good sale on the 500GB drives and not looking for the best price on a 1TB drive. Every 1TB SATA drive I price checked this week was cheaper per GB than its half-TB counterpart.As for RAID testing, my collection of drives almost never includes more than one of each. At the moment I'm finishing up a NVMe RAID review using a set of drives that was loaned by a vendor specifically for this review. Between the disappointing results I'm getting from that project and the prices I'm seeing that don't make SATA RAID economical either, it's not a priority for me to test SATA RAID.
Wardrop - Saturday, February 3, 2018 - link
Is that a software raid or hardware raid you used for your NVMe raid review. I'm guessing software as I'm not even sure any NVMe raid solutions exist. In that case, I imagine we're back to needing dedicated RAID controller to deal with the order of magnitude increase in drive performance compared to HDD's, and then obviously you're left questioning who needs double the increase in sequential performance when a single drive is usually more than fast enough for any sequential workload.peevee - Monday, February 5, 2018 - link
Check m.2 PCIe/NVMe 1TB and 2TB prices.But you'll need an MB with 2 M.2 slots with 4x PCIe connected to CPU, are those even available? Otherwise latencies will dominate the performance (like for M.2 which only provide SATA, either slots or drives).