Crucial MX500 500GB SSD Drive Review

Shopping for a SSD can be a little confusing.  For instance do you focus on storage capacity and price or do you look at performance and pick the best one.  As you may have noticed I included two very similar drives in this review both using Micron 3D NAND and using the same SSD controller.  Due to the SATA interface overall performance will be the same with some variances related to advance feature overhead.  For instance I had to run the PCMark 10 benchmark a couple times due to a lower than expected score.  At the time I chalked that up to Windows 10 deciding it wanted to update however, when you look at the BAPco SYSmark results you can see some of the performance impact of real-world over synthetic scores and how they never quite matched the Crucial BX300.

The Crucial MX500 is a TLC based SSD using the Micron 3D NAND technology.  To help increase speed you’ll find a SLC write acceleration cache on the drive that also helps to reduce wear on the primary NAND chips.  According to Crucial the MX500 Life Expectancy is 1.8 million hours with 180TB of Total Bytes Written or about 98GB a day for 5 years.  This is better than what you get with the Crucial BX300 and backed by a five year warranty.

Overall this drive is designed to replace some of the older MX Series drives with better performance and longer life.  The drives are available in four capacities across two interfaces.  For SATA based drives you can find the Crucial MX500 in four capacities, 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB.  The second interface is the popular M.2 available in three capacities ranging from 250GB up to 1TB.  Performance is identical between the interfaces making us sad to say that NVMe is still not an option.

For more information be sure to check out the MX500 series SSDs on the Crucial website.

Great Performance
SATA 6 Compliant
3D TLC NAND
Available in Sizes up to 2TB
Available in M.2
More Storage Less Cost
Included Imaging Software

No NVMe Version.. Yet