The Crucial MX500 500GB SSD Review: A Second Look
by Billy Tallis on February 2, 2018 9:30 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.
Most drives show a larger difference between full drive and empty drive performance on this Light test than on the Heavy test. Like the MX300, the Crucial MX500 continues to show a more pronounced full-drive performance hit than most of its competition. This effect has been reduced so that the MX500 is faster than all the earlier Crucial drives whether the test is run on an empty drive or full drive. Peak empty-drive performance hasn't improved much, so Crucial hasn't caught up to Samsung.
The Crucial MX500's average and 99th percentile latency scores when the Light test is run on a full drive show a bit more performance drop than most of its competition, but it is not a big outlier the way the MX300 was.
The full-drive average read and write latencies for the Crucial MX500 are a bit higher than what Samsung's drives deliver, but overall the MX500's latency is pretty good.
The Crucial MX300's 99th percentile read and write latencies were both significant outliers among mainstream SATA drives, while the MX500 blends in with more or less the same quality of service level as the competition.
As with the other ATSB tests, the Crucial MX500 draws more power than the MX300, but this time it remains one of the most efficient mainstream SATA SSDs, albeit with a small lead.
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KarlKastor - Saturday, February 3, 2018 - link
I would like to see a review of old SSDs (Indlinx Barefoot, first Intel SSDs, Sandforce SSDs, crucial c300, Samsung 830 for example) and how they would compete against today's drives. The test parcours is much more detailed and challenging for the drives. Can older drives pass this test reasonable good enough or is an upgrade to a modern ssd an major improvement, besides of capacity.velanapontinha - Saturday, February 3, 2018 - link
^this^peevee - Monday, February 5, 2018 - link
Most decent SLC SATA drives should be fine, but there were terrible examples like Kingston V-series which were not much better than HDDs to begin with.But I'd like to see the tests too.
Dragonstongue - Thursday, June 21, 2018 - link
am using your charts to compare the previous results of the MX200 vs the "new" MX500, and most of the numbers and data have changed to show the MX200 as "better" than it once was, if properly tested, this should not have been shown as such.IMHO, if a drive at a specific time using a specific set of drivers etc had say a data rate of 217.85 (crucial MX200 500gb) why does this review "change" to show this same drive now being 235 (a gain of around 8%)
numbers should not be becoming "magically better" IMO, unless firmware was changed without notification, or tests were not run properly the first time around or something like that?
it is quite hard to do direct comparisons when your data does not agree with itself ^.^
MX500 is supposed to be "a fair bit quicker" in most things than MX200 or MX300 (around 18% for the 500gb models..20 odd % for the 1tb models) something is not agreeing with itself based on your data/numbers/review, this is troublesome to say the least, so I suppose my question in this regard is, how "factual" is the testing methodology being used, such as latency numbers (where the original data of MX200 read higher numbers in ms than this review does making this review appearing as if the mx200 is that much faster than it was previously (less latency)
and the power consumption was also higher previously whereas in this review it uses "less" power, the heck is up with this?
if one screwed up original testing methodology "I understand" but, if one just changes data willy nilly to suit vendors or make the older or newer stuff appear better than it actually is, screw that noise (we already have plenty enough companies/corps that do that crud daily..like Ngreedia, Apple, Intel, MSFT etc)
Just saying, had my eye on the MX500, my MX100 256gb has been working very well for me last 2.5-3 years or something like that (still at 99% life) MX200 500gb still snappy (though not quite as snappy as the MX100 for some reason and I have never had it "loaded" currently is at 92% life and yet is at least a 9 month newer drive, have not copied.deleted anywhere close to as much as it claims I have which is confusing...MX500 is supposed to have that much more endurance, but, if the MX200 seems to "chew" endurance more than it should, that is not a good thing.
I have taken all the steps I can to reduce writing to the drive (unless needed) have trim on since day 1 etc...
Anyways, compare the "original" MX200 data you reviewed dated may 22, 2015, with this review dated february 2, 2018, quite a difference in appearances from how so so the drive appeared (MX200) vs the way it "now" appears (seems like not quite a poor drive, though it never was crud drive)
https://www.anandtech.com/show/9258/crucial-mx200-...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12263/the-crucial-m...
would say IMO, double check your info (past info) so you are not making silly mistakes if possible (I know no one is perfect by all means, but I highly doubt you keep hundreds of drives on hand so you can test them a year or 2 down the line, most review sites do not, so does this mean pulling numbers out of thin air?)
take care, love your site by all means, lots of good reading ^.^
dpjtpa - Friday, June 14, 2019 - link
This is definitely the option I will be purchasing soon