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Review: Crucial |
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Evolution continues for Crucial and their
SSD products. The Crucial M500 is the SSD that is replacing the trusty old M4
SSD. As we can expect the M500 not only does everything that that the M4 did, it
does much better, and adds more functions to improve not only the SSD but also
the overall experience that the user gets.
Our regular users remember the review that
Myce did in the past for the Crucial RealSSD C300, and later for the Crucial
M4. Now it’s time to take closer look at the M500. As we expectedthe names
inside are the same, Micron & Marvell, but the numbers have changed, and the
M500 has the latest equipment that Micron and Marvell have to offer, so now
only one question remains to be answered.
How does the Crucial M500 perform?
Crucial was kind enough to provide me with the
M500 480GB SSD for this review. Now you can start reading this in depth review
of the Crucial M500 SSD to find out more about it’s performance.
Company info.
If you're unfamiliar with Crucial, and
their products, you can visit their website to find out more about them, by
clicking the link here.
Now let’s start this review.
Crucial M500 480GB SSD
Let’s start by taking a closer look at the
package and what it comes shipped with.
Packaging
Box front
Box rear
The packaging of the Crucial M500 is
relatively small, and it’s very clean and good looking. The front of the box is
very appealing to the eye, and it also has all basic the information you need
to know about the drive. Moving to the back we can see that Crucial is keeping
the same approach, as it only gives you the information you need to know, such
as what’s inside the box, and where to look for your product support. Scanning
the QR code with your Smartphone will lead to http://www.crucial.com/support/ssd/
Inside the box
The Crucial M500 came in a very simple
package, which includes the document for the three year warranty, a spacer to
make the drive compatible with the 9.5mm form factor, and of course the drive
that comes in the usual anti-static bag.
A closer look at the Crucial M500
Top side of the Crucial M500 SSD
Drive underside
The drive as we can see continues to have
the same clean look as the previous drives had, this time the chassis isn’t
painted and it has a brighter look than the previous drives, something that I
liked.
Now let’s look at what’s inside.
On
the top of the Crucial M500 we will find eight NAND made by micron, the Marvell
Controller, the DDR3 memory chip, and also a lot of capacitors at the top right.
On
the back of the M500 we can see another set of eight 20nm Micron NAND chips.
A
closer look at the MLC NAND, manufactured by Micron using a 20nm technology,
A
picture of the Marvell 88SS9187 controller that uses a custom Crucial firmware.
The
DDR3 chip that is used as a cache is also manufactured by Micron.
Specifications
The following specifications are taken from
the official Crucial website.
From the above table we can get a more
detailed view of the various sizes that the M500 is available in and the
performance that each size can give. As we can see the drive has MTBF of 1.2
million hours, and also a very impressive endurance of 72TB.
One final thing that it’s worth mentioning
is the wide variety of form factors that the M500 is available in, from the
standard 2.5” inch, to the widely spread mSATA, and also you can find it in the
M.2 form factor.
Adaptive Thermal Protection
One very interesting feature of the Crucial
M500 SSD is the adaptive thermal protection. Whilst the drive is designed to
work from 0C up to 70C, the adaptive thermal monitoring is able to reduce NAND
operations when the SSD’s internal temperature begins to reach the maximum
specification. The SSD will remain in this state for as long as it’s needed until
the drives temperature returns back to the specified operating temperatures.
Note that adaptive thermal protection does
not change the current negotiated speed of the SATA bus, nor does it require or
cause any new commands to be issued on the SATA bus.
More importantly, it would be very hard for
most regular users to make the M500 reach temperatures that will require the
drive to trigger this function.
CrystalDiskInfo
In
the above picture we can take a look at all the info available for the M500.
Let’s head to the next page where we
take a look at our testing methods and the review PC.
Test machine
For this review I will be using a computer
with the following configuration:
Hardware:
- Motherboard: AsRock Z68 Extreme 4 (Intel Z68
chipset) - Processor: Intel 2nd generation
Core i5 2500K @ 4Ghz - RAM: 8GB Kingston Hyper X DDR3 1600MHz (dual channel)
- GFX: Onboard Intel HD 3000
- Sound: Onboard Realtek ALC889 HD audio
controller - Hard disk OS: Corsair Nova 64GB
- PSU: Corsair CX430 430W
- Display: Futsiju Siemens 22”
- Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit with
Service Pack 1
The Crucial M500 SSD was connected to the Intel
native SATA 6Gbps (port 1) on the Z68 motherboard of our review PC and all
tests on the drive were carried out with the drive connected to this port. All
power saving features were disabled during all of my synthetic benchmarks.
AHCI mode was also selected for all drives
in the UEFI of our test PC, and all the tests were carried out in this mode.
The SATA 6Gbps drivers used on our review
PC were the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) Version 10.8.0.1003.
Test applications
To test the performance of the Crucial M500
SSD, I will be using the following test applications in this review.
- HD Tune
Pro - ATTO
- Iometer
- AS SSD
Benchmark - CrystalDiskMark
- Anvil’s
Storage Utilities - PCMark Vantage
Test procedures
I will start off our testing procedures
explanation by stating that I did not run many synthetic benchmarks on the Crucial
M500 SSD. You may ask why I have run so few synthetic benchmarks.
SSD technology has moved so fast in the
last couple of years, that basic synthetic benchmarks alone are now of very
limited use, as they don't really tell us much about performance and how the
drive will behave in the real world. I have therefore decided to show some
basic benchmarks for the Crucial M500 SSD, and will complement this with
advanced benchmarks using IOMeter and AS SSD benchmark. I will also show how the
Crucial M500 SSD performs in the real world.
The reality of SSD performance
While I can easily show you which SSD is
technically the faster, when you use one of these modern SSDs as an operating
system drive it becomes very difficult to tell them apart as far as performance
is concerned.
A typical use of a small capacity SSD at
the moment is to have your operating system and applications installed onto the
SSD. The performance difference compared to a traditional HDD is enormous,
however when you start to compare SSD to SSD the difference becomes almost
impossible to detect.
Let’s look at why this is the case.
Drive A can boot to the desktop in 8.11
seconds, and drive B can boot to the desktop in 8.12 seconds, the difference in
time is milliseconds, and can one really tell the difference?
The fact is, all modern SSDs are only
ticking over when they are only running the OS and launching applications, it’s
only when you get to some of the larger capacity SSDs, with enough free space
to be able to hold the actual data that you’re going to be working with, be
that video, audio or pictures, for example, that you actually get a tangible
difference in performance. This is where the SSDs with the better sequential
performance start to pull well ahead of the SSDs which have lower sequential
read/write performance.
Small file random IOPS vs sequential performance
IOPS
This is a fairly complex subject, but I
will do my best to explain things in a manner that is easy to understand.
The term IOPS is the amount of input or
output transactions that can take place in a one second interval, so for
example, if an SSD is quoted as being able to cope with 20,000 4K random write
IOPS, then the SSD should be able to cope with 20,000 input transactions in a
period of one second. If the same SSD is said to be able to produce 20,000 4K
random read IOPS, then the same SSD should be able to produce 20,000 4K random
read output transactions in a one second interval.
Ok, now we have some figures to work with,
the next question is how many IOPS are actually required?
This will depend on your usage pattern. If
you are a typical desktop user who browses the internet, does some word
processing or perhaps some audio or video editing, and perhaps plays a few
games, then in actual fact, you don’t need to have massive 4K random read/write
performance. The actual amount of 4K random performance that is required for a
fast and smooth running system for a desktop user with a usage pattern similar
to the above will be well under 1,000 4K IOPS.
On the other hand, if the SSD is being used
for running a large and complex database server, then 4K random performance is
the absolute measurement of how fast that server will run, as this type of
application does most of its input and output transactions in the 4K domain.
So why would I need an SSD with 80,000 4K
IOPS for a desktop?
In fact you don’t need this type of
performance for a desktop, but an SSD which is capable of coping with 80,000 4K
IOPS will be faster than an SSD which can only cope with 20,000 4K IOPS.
OK, I just said if under 1,000 4K IOPS are
actually required for typical desktop usage, why is an SSD with 80,000 4K IOPS
faster than an SSD with only 20,000 4K IOPS, confused?
You may ask, if I only require 1,000 4K
IOPS surely the rest is wasted?
While you may never need 80,000 4K IOPS,
IOPS is all about latency. The reason that an SSD can cope with as much as 80,000
4K IOPS is because latency in this domain is very low. With 4K files, even if
you require to process 500 of them at the same time, you are not talking about
a huge amount of data, it has far more to do with how long it takes the SSD to
process a single file, and the amount of time required to process a single 4K
is all about how long it takes for the SSD to access or store that data before
it can move on to the next transaction.
In other words an SSD with 80,000 4K IOPS
performance will handle those 500 files faster than the SSD with 20,000 IOPS.
So how will a desktop user even notice this
faster speed if so little 4K random IOPS and data are actually used?
Multitasking is a good example. The more
tasks you run at the same time, you more you will notice the speed difference.
Sequential performance
I have always maintained that sequential
performance was every bit as important as small random file performance for a
desktop SSD. Some highly regarded people on other sites found this statement
quite funny a couple of years ago when I made it, but my, how times have
changed in the world of SSD reviewing.
To me this was always so obvious for a desktop
user. For example, let’s say you want to launch an application or game. Both
have some fairly large files to load, and also a great many small files, but
the point is, even the smaller files are sequential in nature. Now let’s say
you’re into audio or video editing. Video files tend to be huge, and the files
are written or read sequentially. Isn’t this how many users are using their PCs
these days?
Summary
So how does this shape up in the real
world? Which is better, massive 4K IOPS or massive sequential performance?
In an ideal world you want both, as an SSD
with massive random 4K IOPS and sequential performance will always be faster
than an SSD that has high sequential performance and moderate 4K random IOPS
performance, and the same applies to an SSD that has massive 4K random
performance and moderate sequential performance. The SSD which has high
performance in both patterns will always be the faster SSD.
However, you can still have an SSD that is
very fast for desktop use that has moderate random 4K performance and massive
sequential performance, the same can be said about a drive having massive
random 4K performance and moderate sequential performance, as it is about
getting the balance right if you have to compromise on one or the other.
Drive preparation for running the tests
All the SSDs used in this article were in a
clean and fresh state when the testing period started. From then on, each drive
had to rely on its own NAND cleaning effectiveness for the remainder of the
tests.
- Both our spinning HDD drives were
defragged before the start of each test.
- All SSD and HDD used in this article had
their partitions aligned to the Windows 7 x64 defaults.
Where I use graphs in this article to
display results, I will use the following colours to make it easier, for our
readers to see which drive we are reviewing.
Crucial M500 480GB SSD
Comparison SDD
Now let's head to the next page, where I
look at some basic benchmarks...
Reading Benchmarks
HD Tune
HD Tune – Sequential reading test
I present the graph below for comparison
with other recently tested drives.
The result of this test is good for a
modern SATA3 drive.
ATTO disk benchmark
ATTO has become a standard tool for
measuring the data throughput of HDD and SSD. It measures the reading and
writing performance, using different file sizes and block sizes.
The performance of the Crucial M500 is
simply outstanding, the drive can easily reach write speeds of 428MB/Sec and
also read speeds of 539MB/Sec. There's not much more to say about the
performance of the M500.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0
Crystal Disk Mark is quite a handy
benchmarking application, as it focuses on the file sizes that can cause a
problem on a system drive.
The default setting on CrystalDiskMark uses
random data, and that gives a more realistic view on the performance of any
drive. Again the Crucial M500 continues to impress, and the numbers are
outstanding.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD benchmark is a benchmarking tool
specifically designed to test SSDs. The application tests sequential reading
and writing performance, 4K random reading and writing performance.
AS SSD benchmark also tests 4K threaded
performance. This is very exciting, as this test is the first available test
that I am aware of, that simulates how a PC operating system actually works. A
modern PC and OS, such as Windows Vista/7 does not just run a single thread at
a time, it runs many threads. The AS SSD benchmark "4K 64Thrd" tests
run 64 threads simultaneously throughout the test. If this result is good, then
you can be pretty sure the drive will perform extremely well as a system drive.
After the tests complete, AS SSD benchmark
derives a total score for the drive being tested. This is based on all aspects
of the test results, and gives an indication of how the drive is performing
overall.
Now let’s look at the results for the Crucial
M500 SSD in the form of a screenshot. All our other comparison drives’ results
are presented in the form of a graph.
The Crucial M500 is continues to deliver
top performance and it is able to achieve an amazing score of 1034.
PCMark Vantage - HDD Suite
For these tests we will be using
FutureMark’s PCMark Vantage. This suite of real world test applications is
highly regarded, as one of the most comprehensive ways of testing a computer’s
performance in the real world. The PCMark Vantage test application also
includes an HDD/SSD/USB Flash suite of testing procedures, designed to fully
test out the performance of an HDD/SSD to its limits.
PCMark Vantage HDD suite results
Here
are the results for the Crucial M500 480GB SSD.
As it was expected the Crucial M500 shows a
very impressive result.
Summary:
'Outstanding', this is the only word that I can use to describe the performance
of the Crucial M500. It’s clear that Crucial made a big step forward compared
to the M4, but also at the same time the M500 can easily compete with drives
that are considerably faster.
Let's head to the next page for our
IOMeter test results.....
I/O Performance
There is little point of having an SSD
drive that has blazing sustained reading and writing speeds, if the drive can't
handle reading and writing of small random files. If you intend to use your new
SSD drive to store and run your operating system, then the drive must be able
to cope with the many small random files that Windows will write to the drive
continually. So I feel it is very important to test how many of these random
files that a drive can handle in one second. I believe that anything over 1,000
I/O’s per second would be enough for most users running a consumer grade
mainstream PC, and should provide a smooth running system. But obviously, the
more I/O's that a drive can handle, the faster the drive will feel and leave more
headroom for those huge multitasking sessions that users sometimes engage in.
The things that I will look at are the
total I/O per second and total MB/s.
Partition alignment and sector boundaries
Windows 7 and Vista will automatically
align a partition to 4k boundaries during partition creation, Windows XP won’t.
It is imperative that an SSD’s partition is aligned. Windows XP is also
restricted to sector boundaries, while Windows 7 will use 4k boundaries if it
can. The Intel 510 is 4k boundary aware, and will use these boundaries if
possible. Of course it will also remap LBAs for compatibility with the sector
boundaries so that the drive can be used with Windows XP.
IOMeter allows us to set the sector
boundaries for conducting the tests, and I have therefore set the sector
boundaries at 4K, which means the IOMeter tests are valid for Windows 7 and
Windows Vista users. XP users will not be able to obtain such results.
I will provide a screenshot of the tests on
the review drive for those of you who like to see the actual test result. All
the comparison drive results are represented in the form of graphs.
If any of you would like to see a
screenshot from any IOMeter test on a particular drive, please feel free to
request one, and I’ll post the screenshot in the forum thread.
All the IOMeter tests create a 10GB data
set on the target drive, and each test is run for a duration of 3 minutes.
IOMeter 4K random write test with repeating data.
The first test involves creating continual
4KB random files on the target drive with IOMeter. I use a 4KB file size, as it
is believed that Windows will create and modify many of this size of file
constantly in the background during a typical Windows session. It is said that
most 4K random writes take place at a queue depth of only one.
Queue depth 1
Crucial M500 SSD – 4K random write (Queue depth1)
Queue depth 4
Crucial M500 480GB SSD (Queue depth 4)
Queue depth 32
Crucial M500 480GB SSD (Queue depth 32)
4K random write queue depth profile
For this
test I used various queue depths from 1 – 32 to give you an idea how this SSD
performs at different queue depths. For a normal desktop user, with lightweight
multitasking, the queue depth will rarely rise above 2. For heavy multitasking,
the queue depth is unlikely to rise above a value of 8.
A detailed view of how the Crucial M500 SSD
performs with various Queue Depths.
IOMeter 4K random read test.
If there are many 4k files created, then
that must also mean that many 4k files need to be read. This test measures 4k
reading performance.
Queue depth 1
Crucial M500 480GB SSD (Queue depth 1)
Queue depth 4
Crucial M500 480GB SSD (Queue depth 4)
Queue depth 32
Crucial M500 480GB SSD (Queue depth 32)
4K random read queue depth profile.
This test
shows how the review drive scales with increasing queue depths.
Again we can have a more detailed look at the
performance of the Crucial M500 SSD with various Queue Depths.
IOMeter 512KB write test with repeating data.
Sequential writing performance is also very
important; in this test sequential writing performance is measured.
Crucial M500 480GB SSD 512K Sequential write with repeating data
A very good result for the Crucial M500
SSD, the drive reached a max speed of 423.80MB/Sec.
IOMeter 512KB read test.
This test measures 512k sequential reading
performance.
Crucial M500 480GB SSD – 512K sequential reading test
The Crucial M500 SSD gives an excellent
performance in this test, and maxes out at an impressive 535.27 MB/Sec.
IOMeter Workstation simulation (outstanding I/Os = 64).
When running applications you will find
that there is a mixture of small random files and larger sequential files,
being created and read. Not only that, it isn’t just one file at a time. In
this test I measure a simulated workstation pattern, with a queue depth of 64
(threaded).
Crucial M500 480GB SSD – Workstation simulation
In this last test the Crucial M500 again delivers
the same excellent performance. The M500 was able to achieve the speed of 318.42MB/s.
Summary
As it was expected the Crucial M500 SSD gives
excellent overall performance in almost all of our tests. It’s clear that the
M500 is a solid SSD that simply won't disappoint the end user.
Now let’s head to the next page where we
will look at how the Crucial M500 SSD performs using Anvil's Storage utilities....
Anvil’s Storage Utilities
As well as performing SSD endurance tests.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities has a very nice SSD benchmarking application. The SSD
benchmark tests many different aspects of SSD performance, including 4K random
at different queue depths, and also sequential performance, but more importantly
than this, all using real test data.
Another very nice feature of Anvil’s SSD
benchmark is the fact that you can change the compression levels of the test
data. The compression levels of the data sets used for the tests can be varied
from 0% compression right up to 100% compressed data, and there are even a few
data profiles already included, such as database (8%) compression, and also an
application profile (46%) compression, which is designed to simulate real
application data being read and written to the SSD.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities is still in beta
at the moment, but the application is currently solid enough to use in this
article, and I have already verified the results obtained using an SATA
analyser.
I will include a screenshot of the review
drive, and all comparison results will be presented in the form of graphs. If
you would like to see screenshots of the test results obtained on the other
SSDs in this article, you can do so by following the link here.
I will also be testing three different
compression profiles, which are as follows.
- 0 fill (100% compressible data)
- Application simulation profile (46%
compressed) - 100% (non compressible data)
So let’s begin the tests.
0 fill
Crucial M500 480GB SSD (0 fill)
Results
are based on the total highest score.
The M500 gives a very impressive result, as
we can see from the graph the M500 is among the top performing drives.
Application profile
Crucial M500 480GB SSD (application profile)
Results are based on the total highest score.
Again we can see that the Crucial M500 is
giving an excellent performance.
100% incompressible
Crucial M500 480GB SSD (100% incompressible)
Results are based on the total highest score.
Closing this part of our tests we see the
same outstanding performance, the M500 gives a top performance even with
compressible data, there's not much more to ask for.
Summary
With consistent, rock solid performance, the Crucial M500 simply refuses to give a total lower result than
4637,38. We can clearly see the work that Crucial has done to this drive, starting
with the NAND that they've chosen, and finishing with the custom firmware that
is used in the Marvel controller.
Now let's head to the next page for some
real world tests....
It has become clear that simply conducting
endless benchmarks on SSD drives is pointless. Real users may run a few
benchmarks when they first fit their SSD drive, but most users just want a
drive that performs well in the real world. They want their drive to work
"out of the box" and work fast and smoothly.
Most of the latest SSD drives can deliver
very fast sustained reading and writing speeds, but these alone tell you very
little about how the drive will perform in the real world.
If you intend to use your SSD as your
primary system drive, with an operating system and applications installed and
running from the drive, real world performance becomes much more important than
just fast sequential read and write speeds, in this case I felt that it was
time to move into a different method of testing.
From now on I will only use the log files
from the Event Viewer to measure the start-up and shutdown of the system, and
also use filecopy to measure all my copy tests from a RAM disk to the selected
storage drive that I will be testing. For these tests I will also enable all
power savings features that are available, since I believe that this is the way
that the majority of the users will have them set on their PC.
Real world copy tests
I will now conduct some real world copy
tests so that you can have a much better view of how the drive will perform. In
these simple tests I try to simulate what a real user does with their drives. I
will be copying some mp3 files, various picture and MKV files, and finishing by
installing MS Office 2007.
As I said earlier from now on all my test
files will be stored in a RAM disk and copied/pasted to the destination drive
using filecopy. The filecopy utility will be used from now on for all my tests,
and I’ll be using it this way to measure the time that it takes to copy the
files.
Before I move on to the test, I want to
give you an idea on how fast your RAM is. Below you can find the results.
As
we can clearly see speed isn’t going to be an issue in these tests.
Copy tests – 259 MP3 song files (1.36GB total)
I am starting this test by copying 259 mp3
files from the RAM disk to the destination SSD, and as we can see the Crucial
M500 simply destroys the competition.
Copy tests – 3,377 JPEG picture files (2.56GB total)
Copying 3.377 picture files again from the RAM
disk to the Crucial M500, again shows how fast it is.
Copy Tests – 1 MKV and 1 SRT file (3.46GB)
The trend continues, the Crucial M500 SSD
again shows top performance.
Windows start-up and closedown based on the Event Viewer
Logs
Start-up & Shutdown time
The next two screen shots were taken after I'd
installed all the drivers and all the software that I use every day. Below are
the results.
Used
state boot time in measured in milliseconds.
Used
state shutdown, again measured in milliseconds.
As we can see the Crucial M500 gives some
very impressive times, on both start-up and shutdown. Notice that the times in this
tests will vary from system to system and it’s only here as a reference for
each drive.
Installing applications
Installing applications is possibly
something you don't do that often. But should you replace your system disk,
then you will most likely have to re-install your applications. Most of the SSD
drives I have tested up until now are quite slow at installing applications,
most likely because their I/O performance was quite limited.
For these tests, we picked some popular
applications and copied the entire contents of the CD or DVD media to the RAM disk.
We did this to make sure that the reading speed of our CD/DVD reader would not
hamper the performance of the target drive.
We then installed these applications onto
our comparison HDD drives, which were all running mirror image installations of
our Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit installation, and timed the amount of time
taken to install the application with a stopwatch on each of the drives.
MS Office 2007 Enterprise (full install)
Now let’s see
how the Crucial M500 SSD performs with the installation of MS Office 2007
Enterprise Edition.
The procedure
followed was very simple. I copied all the files from the CD to the RAM disk and
use the virtual drive as a source for the installation files.
It’s clear that the Crucial M500 SSD is
able to give a very solid result, and we can see the 15 second improvement over
the Crucial M4 SSD.
Speed degradation after heavy testing
On this page I will test how the SSD
performs after heavy testing and usage.
I will run an AS SSD benchmark test when
the OS is freshly installed so that we can get a good view of how the drive
performs with the OS. After that I will fill the drive up to 50% of its
capacity, use the drive for a few days, and then re-run the AS SSD benchmark.
The same procedure will be followed once again, but this time the drive will be
filled close to 90% or higher of its capacity. To finish this test, I will
simply delete all the extra data and leave the PC idle for a few hours so that
the controller has the time to perform any necessary cleaning, then see how the
drive performs.
For reference here is the result of the first run with the default MS driver
that Windows 7 comes with. As we can see the result is very good, but let's see
if things will improve with the Intel driver.
Here things start to get interesting, as we
can see there is an improvement with the Intel driver, and the enabled C states
of the CPU on BIOS have an impact on the overall total score of the SSD, but in
daily use no one will notice the difference in speed.
Getting the drive to slow down was a very
hard task to complete, it took me two hours of deleting, and copying/pasting
files to get the drive to slowdown. Then again losing only seven points in the
total score isn’t much. So at this point as you can see the Crucial M500 delivers
an outstanding performance. Notice that in this test the drive had only 20GB of
free space.
After deleting a lot of files I this time had
around 210GB of free space on the M500, so without leaving the drive to settle
down and allowing trim to optimize it, I reran the as SSD benchmark, and the
result was simply outstanding. The Crucial M500 showed that it can recover the
performance it needs very quickly.
For my final test I deleted all the
unnecessary files and give the drive 10 minutes to settle. In the above picture
you can see the result of my final test.
Crystal Disk Info
One thing that I noticed when I was
deleting and copy pasting files from once part of the drive to the other was
that the drive was getting a little hot, and also that Crystal Disk Info was
able to successfully monitor the temperature. Below I will give you an example
of this.
Here is the drive temperature when it had
been idle for ten minutes after a two hour intensive read/write, without any
fan cooling it, and with a room temperature close to 26C.
Here you can see the rise in temperature during
a two hour of intensive read/write. This is the first time I've seen an SSD that
is able to display the temperature.
This concludes our review. To read the final
thoughts and conclusion, click the link below....
Conclusion:
Let us summarise the most important
positive and negative points below:
Positive:
- Outstanding operation as a system drive.
- Is able to achieve 80.000 IOPS without
sweating. - SATA 6Gbps support.
- 7mm thick SSD ready for Ultrabooks.
- Hardware data encryption.
- Very fast recovery from a used state.
- Adaptive thermal protection.
- 3 year warranty.
- Very well priced.
Negative:
- None
To sum up, this is what I would say:
As I said at the beginning, 'evolution',
is the word that describes the M500 and reflects the work that Crucial has put
into this drive not only to make it faster than the M4, but also implement
technologies such as hardware encryption and adaptive thermal protection. But
not stopped there, a custom firmware for the Marvell controller and the new
20nm NAND are also steps forward and are some of the key features contributing
to the performance of the M500.
The Crucial M500 gave an impressively solid
performance, and the drive was able to maintain very high overall performance
even when it was pushed for more than two hours of continuous read/writes.
What about the Price? Here in Greece the
starting price of the 120GB M500 is 113€, and you will find the 240GB at 188€,
and the 480GB at 368€. On amazon.de the prices you will be able to get the M500
at start at 107€ for the 120GB drive, 182€ for the 240GB, 336€ for the 480GB,
and 535€ for the 960GB drive. As we can see the Crucial M500 has a very
attractive price, especially as you move up to the 480GB and 960GB drives, and
there it’s very hard for any drive to beat the M500. You can also get the M500
directly from Crucial.
The parting sentence is:
“Why try to re invent the wheel when you
have the tools and the knowledge to improve it? That’s what Crucial did, and
they did very well. The M500 SSD is a clear step forward in all directions. It
has excellent performance and cutting edge technology in both hardware and
firmware and most importantly it comes at a price that you simply can’t ignore.
There isn’t much more to ask from an SSD.”
I therefore give the 'Very good' rating and
the “Editor's choice” award to the Crucial M500 480GB SSD.
Thanks to:
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EFD |
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Alex Schepeljanski for |
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FutureMark for providing a |
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