Crucial MX500 1TB SSD Review

 

	Review: Crucial MX500 1TB Reviewed by: Antonis Sapanidis Provided by: Crucial Firmware version: M3CR010

It's not that long ago that I first tested the all new Crucial MX300 750GB SSD, and back then this was the first drive to feature the new 3D TLC NAND that micron had to offer. Now Micron has a new SSD and it's not called MX400 as the previous naming scheme would have suggested, but it’s the MX500, and as we can expect it’s an update to the MX300 featuring the 2^nd generation of #D TLC NAND, from Micron. 

Thanks to Crucial for providing me with the MX500 1TB SSD for this review, and to find out more about Crucial and their products simply click here.

So let’s start this review by looking at the packaging and its contents.

Crucial MX500 1TB SSD

As always I will start by taking a look at the package and the contents that are included with the Crucial MX500 1TB SSD. We'll start with the package.

The front of the box.

The back of the box.

The front of the Crucial MX500 SSD.

Here is the rear of the Crucial MX500 SSD.

Here is a look at the inside the of the Crucial MX500 1TB SSD, and when I opened the drive I saw eight micron NAND and one RAM chip.

On the other side of the PCB we find another set of eight micron MAND, the Silicon Motion controller, and the RAM.

Specifications of the Crucial MX500 1TB SSD

The new MX500 uses Micron's 2^nd generation 3D-TLC NAND and it can reach read speeds of up to 560MB/s and write speeds of up to 510MB/s. One big change that is welcomed is the warranty as it has gone up from three years to five years. The MX500 currently is only available as a 2.5” SATA drive, with capacities from 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB.
Pricing at the time of this review starts from €82 for the 250GB SSD and rises to €137, €266, and €514 for the 2TB SSD. Later we will also have an m.2 SATA
version of the MX500.

CrystalDiskInfo

In the above screenshot we can see all the available info for the Crucial MX500 1TB SSD.

 

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:

PC:

• Motherboard: ASUS X99-A (Intel X99 chipset)
• Processor: Intel Core i7 5280K @ 4.4GHz
• RAM: Corsair Vengance RGB 4x8GB
• GFX: MSI GTX 960 2GB
• Sound: Onboard Realtek HD audio controller
• OS SSD:  Hyperx Fury 240GB
  
• PSU: Seasonic 750W
• Display: Futsiju Siemens 22”
• Operating System: Windows 10 x64

 

The Crucial MX500 1TB SSD was connected to second SATA port on the ASUS X99-A motherboard. All power saving features were disabled during each of my synthetic benchmarks.

The SATA 6Gbps drivers used on our review PC were Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) Version 14.5.0.1081.

Test applications

To test the performance of the Crucial MX500 1TB 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

Test procedures

I will start off our testing procedures explanation by stating that I did not run many synthetic benchmarks on the Crucial MX500 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 MX500 1TB SSD, and will complement this with advanced benchmarks using IOMeter and AS SSD benchmark. I will also show how the Crucial MX500 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.

Okay, 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.

Okay, 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 10 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 MX500 1TB SSD

 Comparison SDD

 

Now let's head to the next page, where I look at some basic benchmarks...

Reading Benchmarks

HD Tune

HD Tune Test – Sequential reading test

An excellent result to start our tests, with the Crucial MX500 achieving 524.6 MB/Sec.  

ATTO disk benchmark

ATTO has become a standard tool for measuring the data throughput of HDDs and SSDs. It measures the reading and writing performance, using different file sizes and block sizes.

The result for the Crucial MX500 SSD is again excellent.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0

CrystalDiskMark is quite a handy benchmarking application, as it focuses on the file sizes that can cause problems for a system drive.

The overall result is excellent for the Crucial MX500 SSD.

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  MX500 1TB SSD in the form of a screenshot. All our other comparison drives’ results are presented in the form of a graph.

Another excellent result for the Crucial MX500 SSD.

Let's head to the next page and run some tests using PCMark 8.....

 

PC Mark 8 - HDD Suite

We have built quite a close relationship with FutureMark software, the authors of the PCMark PC benchmarking software that we use in our tests. I decided I would use PCMark Vantage as stopgap measure until the more up-to-date PCMark 8 benchmarking suite became available.
I'm pleased to say that PCMark 8 is now available, and it gives me great pleasure to introduce you all to the results obtained by this new 'real world'  benchmarking suite.

I will describe the basic way that each test is carried out, above the graph for each test.

PC Mark 8 HDD suite results

Here is a screenshot displaying the results for the Crucial MX500 1TB SSD.

The result for the Crucial MX500 SSD is good.

The result for the After Effects test.

The result for the InDesign test.

The result for Photoshop heavy test.

The result for the Illustrator test.

The result for the Photoshop light test.

The result for Battlefield 3.

The result for World of Warcraft.

The result for the Word test.

The result for the Excel test.

The result for the PowerPoint test.

Summary:

The overall performance of the Crucial MX500 SSD is again excellent.  

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 10 will automatically align a partition to 4k boundaries during partition creation, Windows XP won’t. It is imperative that an SSDs partition is aligned. Windows XP is also restricted to sector boundaries, while Windows 10 will use 4k boundaries if it can. The Crucial MX500 SSD 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 10 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 20GB 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.

Queue depth 1

Crucial MX500 SSD (Queue depth 1)

The result is excellent.

Queue depth 4

Crucial MX500 SSD (Queue depth 4)

Again the Crucial MX500 gives an excellent result.

Queue depth 32

Crucial MX500 SSD (Queue depth 32)

Once again the performance of the Crucial MX500 SSD is excellent.

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.

Overall the Crucial MX500 SSD delivers outstanding read performance.

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 writing performance.

Queue depth 1

Crucial MX500 SSD (Queue depth 1)

This result is very good for the Crucial MX500 SSD.

Queue depth 4

Crucial MX500 SSD (Queue depth 4)

The result here, is again very good.

Queue depth 32

Crucial MX500 SSD (Queue depth 32)

A very good result for the Crucial MX500 SSD.

4K random write queue depth profile.    

This test shows how the review drive scales with increasing queue depths.

The overall performance of the Crucial MX500 SSD is very good, but not as impressive as the read result.

IOMeter 512KB write test with repeating data.

Sequential writing performance is also very important, and in this test I will be measuring the sequential writing performance of the drive.

Crucial MX500 SSD - 512K Sequential write with repeating data

The Crucial MX500 SSD gives a very good result, achieving 508.04MB/Sec.

IOMeter 512KB read test.

This test measures 512k sequential reading performance.

Crucial MX500 SSD – 512K sequential reading test

An outstanding result for Crucial MX500 SSD in the read test.

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 MX500 SSD – Workstation simulation

In the workstation test the Crucial MX500 SSD gave the best result that I have seen so far from an SATA SSD.

Summary

The Crucial MX500 SSD gives very good performance in the write tests, but is excellent in all the read tests.

Let's head to the next page for our power consumption test results.....

Power requirements and efficiency

Storage device manufacturers by law must provide power consumption specifications with their storage device products. Quite often these specifications are quite vague, and rarely, if ever, publish the power efficiency of their storage devices with regard to how much work a storage device can do for a given amount of energy consumed. In this article we will disclose with unprecedented precision, the energy efficiency of some popular storage devices. 

Myce has now secured a piece of 'state of the art' test equipment, which takes a sample every four micro-seconds, that I will be using to measure the power consumption of consumer grade SSDs and HDDs. I'm so very proud to be able to announce that Myce.wiki, in partnership with Quarch Technology, now aims to bring our readers the most comprehensive, and accurate, power consumption tests ever carried out on consumer grade storage devices, to be found anywhere on the Internet.

Myce’s Power Testing will be carried out using Quarch Technology products. More specifically we are privileged that Quarch has allowed us to use their latest Programmable Power Module (‘PPM’) and we would also like to take this opportunity to give a huge 'thank you' to Quarch for providing this equipment. The PPM is specifically designed for testing low power sleep states on modern SSDs and as such has a remarkably accurate low level current measurement, down to 100μA (micro amps, or millionths of an amp). Please click here for details.

Quarch Technology is a world leader in the supply of testing solutions for the data storage industry and if you would like any further information please visit their website by clicking here. 

Let's take a closer look at the Quarch PPM box in a bit more detail.

Quarch Technology PPM

The Quarch Technology PPM is able to provide two power supply rails to the target SSD. A 12V (volt) rail is required for PCIe based SSDs, and also for SATA HDDs, SATA HDDs also require the 5V rail to function. All the power requirements of a SATA SSD are handled by the 5V rail.

The Quarch Technology PPM can switch between 5V and 3.3V on the secondary power output channel as required. So for SATA based SSDs it is set to 5V, and for PCIe based SSDs, it is set to 3.3V.  

On the right of the Quarch PPM, you can see the socket where the main power injection lead connects.

On the rear of the box (not shown) you will find a USB 2 socket, a power socket (to supply power to the unit) and a Torridon connection interface, for connecting to external equipment.

My setup.

Although the Quarch Technology PPM can be used on a single PC, which can act both as host and measurement system, I will be using two PCs to run the tests. One PC will handle the measurements, and the second PC will act both as a host for the target SSD, and will also be used to load the target SSD with data. This will allow me to do some pretty fancy power consumption tests.

 

I will first show the type of workload being used to load the SSD during the power consumption test. I will then present the power consumption graph, and power consumption statistics of the SSD.

I will display the results in the form of bar graphs, at the end of each test carried out in this article, so one can compare the results obtained on all the SSDs featured in this article.

I will use the following IOMeter test patterns to load the SSD or HDD.

• 4K random read and write at a queue depth of 1 (to emulate a lightweight consumer workload).
• 4K random read and write at a queue depth of 4 (to emulate a medium workload).
• 4K random read and write at a queue depth of 32 (to emulate a heavy workload).
• 512K sequential read (to emulate reading a sequential file from the storage device).
• 512K sequential write (to emulate writing a sequential file to the storage device).

Power requirements for a lightweight consumer workload. - 4K random read and write QD1

A typical lightweight consumer workload will generally be at very low queue depths. Typically at a queue depth of one or less. I'm testing random data at a block size of 4 Kilobytes, as this block size of small random files is generally accepted as the most frequently occurring in the consumer environment.

I will show the chart generated by the Quarch PPM for the drive that I have tested. I will then show the results in the form of bar graphs, so one can easily compare with other recently tested SSDs.

There will actually be two bar graphs for each test. The first graph will show the average power consumption during the test run. The second graph, which is much more important, will indicate the power efficiency of the storage device, showing how much work the storage device can do for each Watt of energy it consumes.

4K Random Read - queue depth 1

Crucial MX500 1TB SSD – 4K random read QD1

The average power consumption for the 4K QD1 random read test.

An excellent result for the Crucial MX500 SSD in the IOPS per watt graph.

 

4K Random Write - queue depth 1

Crucial MX500 1TB SSD – 4K random write QD1

The average power consumption for the 4K QD1 random write test.

 

An excellent result for the Crucial MX500 SSD.

Power requirements for a medium weight consumer workload. - 4K random read and write QD4

A typical medium weight consumer workload will generally be at a queue depth of four or lower. This workload would typically involve some multitasking, with perhaps two or three applications running, and processing data simultaneously.  I'm testing random data at a block size of 4 Kilobytes, as this block size of small random files is generally accepted as the most frequently occurring in the consumer environment.

I will show the charts generated by the Quarch PPM, for the drive that I have tested. I will then show the results in the form of bar graphs, so one can easily compare with other recently tested SSDs.

4K Random Read - queue depth 4

Crucial MX500 1TB SSD – 4K random read QD4

The average power consumption for the 4K QD4 random read test.

Another excellent result for the Crucial SSD.

4K Random Write - queue depth 4

Crucial MX500 1TB SSD – 4K random write QD4

The average power consumption for the 4K QD4 random write test.

Once again the Crucial MX500 SSD provides a very impressive result.

Power requirements for a heavyweight consumer workload. - 4K random read and write QD32

Whilst this workload is unlikely arise for the casual consumer PC user, it could well appear in a semi-professional consumer environment, such as in a graphics workstation. This workload would usually involve heavy multitasking, and having several processes running concurrently that require constant access to small files located on the storage device for input or output.

I'm testing random data at a block size of 4 Kilobytes, as this block size of small random files is generally accepted as the most frequently occurring in the consumer environment.

I will show the chart generated by the Quarch PPM, for the drive that I have tested. I will then show the results in the form of bar graphs, so one can easily compare with other recently tested SSDs.

4K Random Read - queue depth 32

Crucial MX500 1TB SSD – 4K random read QD32

The average power consumption for the 4K QD32 random read test.

Another excellent result for the Crucial MX500 in this test.

4K Random Write - queue depth 32

Crucial MX500 1TB SSD – 4K random write QD32

The average power consumption for the 4K QD32 random write test.

In the last chart we see the Crucial MX500 at the top.

Power requirements of a storage device when reading and writing sequential data

Not all of a consumer workload is based around the reading and writing of small random files. Many files are sequential in nature, and can vary in size from a few Kilobytes to several Gigabytes, so your storage device will spend a lot of time reading and writing sequential data.

I'm testing sequential data at a block size of 512 Kilobytes.

512KB Sequential read

Crucial MX500 1TB SSD – Sequential read

The average power consumption for the 512K read test.

The result is impressive for the Crucial MX500 1TB SSD.

512KB Sequential write

Crucial MX500 1TB SSD – Sequential write

The average power consumption for the 512K write test.

The write result for the Crucial MX500 1TB SSD is again excellent.

Power requirements of storage devices when they are idle and doing no work at all

The practical reality relating to power consumption is that it can be quite erratic and sometimes unpredictable. Some of us will invest in the most powerful PC we can afford, only to find that the PC can spend quite a lot of time running and doing absolutely nothing. Storage devices are no different.

Often we can be sitting idly pondering what to do next, or perhaps browsing the Internet. When we arrive at a page that interests us, we will read it, and that can take a fair amount of time to complete. During this period the storage device will most likely be idle, but still consuming energy.

In this test, I'm measuring how much energy the storage device consumes when doing no work at all and with link power management disabled.

Crucial MX500 1TB SSD – Drive idle

Crucial’s MX500  again shows very impressive power consumption when it is idle.

I will now show one more test, and this should be regarded as for information purposes only.

Power requirement trace of an SSD booting Windows 10, in real time.

This test is for interest only, and shows the power requirements of the review SSD booting Windows 10 to the desktop.

Crucial MX500 1TB – Real time trace of the drive booting Windows 10 to the desktop.

 

Summary

The Crucial MX500 SSD is a very impressive drive, for an SATA SSD, being able to keep up with the HyperX Predator and in some tests surpass it. Overall the drive has an excellent performance per watt.

Now let’s head to the next page where we will look at how the Crucial MX500 1TB 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.

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 MX500 1TB SSD (0 fill)

Results are ranked by highest total score.

The result in this test is very good, but compressed data is not the strongest point of the Crucial MX500.

Application profile

Crucial MX500 1TB SSD (application profile)

Results are ranked by highest total score.

This result is very good for the Crucial MX500 SSD.

100% incompressible

Crucial MX500 1TB SSD (100% incompressible)

Results are based on the highest total score.

The result here is excellent for the Crucial MX500 SSD.

Summary

The Crucial MX500 SSD delivers very good performance in general and is able to give even better results with incompressible data.

 

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.

Read write tests – 259 MP3 song files (1.36GB total)

I will start this set of tests by copying 259 MP3 files from the RAM disk to the destination SSD and also from the SSD to the RAM disk.

This result is excellent for the Crucial MX500 SSD.

Read write tests – 3,377 JPEG picture files (2.56GB total)

Continuing my set of tests, but this time I will be copying 2.54GB of pictures that are stored in the RAM disk to the currently testing SSD and vice versa.

Again an excellent result for the Crucial MX500 SSD.

Read write tests – 1 MKV and 1 SRT file (3.46GB)

Copying a movie is very common task for all of us, and in this test there are two files that will be copied from the RAM disk to the SSD and again from the SSD to the RAM disk.

Another excellent result for the Crucial MX500 SSD.

Read write tests – ISO (7927MB)

For this test, I copied ISO of the 'Iron Man' movie from the RAMDisk to the SSD and vice versa.

It's the same story in the ISO test, as the Crucial MX500 SSD again shows excellent performance.

Read write tests – Small files (533MB)

I have decided to adapt the very small files test that I am using as part of my USB3 flash tests, so this time I will be also copying all the files from the RAM disk to the SSD, and again from the SSD to the RAM disk.

The overall result is good for the Crucial MX500 SSD.

Windows start-up based on the Boot Racer 5.00

Start-up time

On the next screen shot you can compare the current tested SSD and compare it to other drives that I have tested. Below I present the results.

Boot time is very good for the Crucial MX500 SSD as it only needed 28.1 seconds to boot into the OS. Keep in mind that over time the boot time will change.

Installing applications

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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 10 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 MX500 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 used the virtual drive as a source for the installation files.

 

The Crucial MX500 SSD needed 91 seconds to install Office 2007. This is an outstanding result.

Speed degradation after heavy testing

On this page I will measure 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.

In this picture you can see the test files that I will be copying to fill the drive with data, as you can see files vary from 8GB ISOs to very small text files.

In the picture below you will find all the applications that were installed for this test using Ninite, and I have also installed Microsoft Office 2007.

Now let’s start our tests.

 

Here is the result for the Crucial MX500 SSD. As an OS drive, this is an excellent result to start.

When you fill the drive to almost full, you will see a drop in performance, and we can see that the overall score has dropped to 1041.

Leaving the drive half filled with data, and also leaving it for a few minutes idle time, we can see that it has recovered and the score has gone up to 1164.

With all the extra files deleted the Crucial MX500 SSD again went up to 1186, and as we can see the drive was able to deliver performance similar to that which I got when I first tested with the clean OS.

Write Speed test

At this moment I would like to say HD Tune write speed test was the very first test that I ran on this drive right after I got it out of the box, and from looking at the result it was obvious that it wouldn’t be very difficult to push it to its limits.

Here is the write result for the Crucial MX500 SSD, again an impressive result.

This concludes our review. To read the final thoughts and conclusion, click the link below....

 

Final thoughts

With the release of the MX500 SSD Crucial has done a great job with this drive, the 2^nd generation of 3D TLC NAND and for the first time on an MX SSD, the Silicon Motion controller are telling signs that Crucial was not only was aiming for the top, but this could be one of their best drives since the MX100 and BX100. As we have seen with all previously released SSDs from Crucial, you get all the basics that you need to get started, including the cloning software, a tool that will make life much easier for those that don’t want to do a clean install. Also Crucial offers their Storage executive suite, a suite that gives users the option to look for
new firmware, or manually set the over provisioning, and much more that I would mention, but you can find out here.

All this is very good, but it also needs to be backed with very good performance. Overall the MX500 is an excellent drive, the write speed of the drive is  510MB/Sec and it might not look as impressive as numbers that we have seen from other Crucial drives, but it's more than enough for all daily tasks and the drive won't slowdown as easily as previous TLC and 3D TLC drives did, also the random performance is very impressive. Read performance is another story, here is what your drive will mostly spent its time doing, and it is here that the drive is able to shine, not only in the sequential tests but most importantly in the 4K random test on low queue depths. It's simply an excellent drive for daily use.

The power consumption of the Crucial MX500 is also very impressive. In all tests the drive was able to give an excellent score in the IOPS per Watt chart, and also when the drive is idle it’s able to consume very little power.

Real world usage is also another positive for the Crucial MX500 1TB SSD, the drive was able to complete all the tests that I performed very quickly, it was also able to hold its performance even when it was filled with data, but at the same time it was able to recover very quickly when it got more free space.

Now pricing, the pricing of the Crucial MX500 1TB is very good, for the performance that it offers, and yes after all those years Crucial has extended their warranty to five years.

To sum up, this is what I would say:

“With the MX500 Crucial has given us as an excellent SATA SSD, superb performance, and a five year warranty. The Crucial MX500 is everything that you need in an SATA SSD.”

Therefore, I give the ‘Outstanding’ rating and the "Editor's Choice” award to the Crucial MX500 1TB SSD.

 

Thanks to:

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