The Crucial/Micron M500 Review (960GB, 480GB, 240GB, 120GB)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 9, 2013 9:59 AM ESTPower Consumption
The M500 supports the new Device Sleep standard which will see platform support with Haswell this year. Crucial claims DIPM enabled idle power as low as 80mW, however even with DIPM enabled on our testbed we weren't able to get anything south of ~1W at idle. I'm digging to see if this is a M500 issue or one specific to our testbed, but Crucial is confident that in a notebook you'd see very little idle power consumption with the M500. Supporting DevSleep is important as that'll quickly become a must have feature for Haswell notebooks.
Load power looks excellent, which gives me hope that Crucial's idle power is indeed as good as they claim. The M500 is a direct competitor to Samsung's SSD 840 Pro when it comes to power consumption under load. Given how power efficient the 840 Pro is, the M500 is in good company.
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RU482 - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
I have had an M500 mSATA 120GB running Anvil Storage Utilities for a couple weeks now. Like the Intel 535 30GB and 240GB, the M500 120GB is slower and runs hotter than Sandisk 64GB X100 and x110 evals I'm also testingteiglin - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
How long would it take to run the Destroyer on a HDD? Or is that too depressing to consider? :)andrew-1983 - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
The AS-SSD incompressible sequential read numbers seem rather low, in other reviews it's around 490MB/s, not 390, both for the 960GB and the 480GB size. Or am I missing something?philipma1957 - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
I am waiting on my 960gb an amazon preorder. I will build a mac mini fusion with the 1tb hgst 7200 rpm hdd. my quad 2.3 mini will also have 16gb ram kingston plug n play.philipma1957 - Wednesday, April 17, 2013 - link
all my gear came on tues I set up the mini and it now has a 1.96tb fusion drive. very nice machine with a very nice ssd.danielmorris - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
Once you get the new destroyer benchmark done and most of the ssds run through it, I think it would be interesting to run an hdd or two through it. It might take a week or two but it would encourage us who still have an hdd to get an ssd.praftman - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - link
Recently the MyDigitalSSD was reviewed and it was mentioned a 960GB varient was undergoing review. Here we see:"...the M500 is really the only game in town. ...a good, high-capacity SSD for notebook use and based on my options today, I'd have no issues going with the 960GB M500."
...So does that mean that the MyDigitalSSD 960GB is looking not up to par? At only $800 and with better Idle power consumption it was my first choice.
Also, it is my understanding from the article that the lower Idle figures Micron claims are entirely dependent on these next-gen Haswell laptops and I should see no such difference from your reported ~1w with my 2012 MBP...correct?
praftman - Friday, April 12, 2013 - link
?mayankleoboy1 - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - link
in the Destroyer test, even with so many tasks, the average QD is ~5.5 .That means that for the average desktop usage, the QD is around 1. We need more tests that simulate such low QD usage.
Also, I am curious why are you testing consumer SSD's with a workload that is atleast two orders of magnitude more intensive than what people actually use. Basically, you are testing a client SSD with a Server workload. I dont see what it tests.
What is the use-case of testing such loads on a desktop SSD ?
Tjalve - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - link
I agree. Thats why ive done some benchmarking of "real world scenarios". I actually recorded HDD activity from three diffrent people who use there computer for three entirley diffrent reasons. One beeing a gamer, one beeing one of the people at the office where I work (outlook, word, powerpoint,firefox) and the last one is recorded from a friend of mine who is a freelance video editor. So the last trace is based on him editing and compiling videos.http://www.nordichardware.se/SSD-Recensioner/svens...
http://www.nordichardware.se/SSD-Recensioner/svens...
http://www.nordichardware.se/SSD-Recensioner/svens...