Crucial MX500 500GB SSD Drive Review

Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers can change depending on what hardware is being tested.  These were recorded using Sandra Professional Version 24.50.2017.11

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a freeware disk benchmarking utility that can test a variety of storage solutions from single hard drives to multi level RAID arrays and solid state disks.  The tests can be broken down to transfer sizes between 512B to 64MB with lengths between 64KB and 32GB.  Testing results are shown on a transfer chart with reads and writes clearly marked.

For our benchmark the 64MB transfer is being recorded.

Crystal Disk Mark is a widely available disk benchmarking program that can test a variety of different scenarios from Sequential to Random with Multiple and Single queues.

For our tests the Sequential and Random test with multiple queues and threads will be recorded.

PCMark 10 is an overall system benchmark to measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. Similar to 3DMark this new version tests the entire system as a whole using applications that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office.  This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be apparent to end users and consumers.

SYSmark 2014 SE is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation, and data/financial analysis and features the latest and most popular applications from each of their respective fields.  This is a Second Edition release to the popular SYSmark 2014 that works better with Windows 10.    

As expected the Crucial MX500 drive performed quite well and matched the performance of the faster Crucial BX300.  They are using the same NAND and controller afterall.  Benchmarks like this really only confirm what you can see when reading the specifications sheet leaving us to hunt deeper for the subtle differences between the drives.  What I find interesting is that the MX500 is actually faster than the older MX300 which tells us that Crucial has really done a lot to increase overall performance while still offering the same basic features.  The BX300 drive and MX500 are very similar in terms of hardware, of course the differences are total capacity and advanced features specific to the MX Series.