Dramatically faster than a hard drive, the Crucial M500 SSD isn’t just a storage upgrade – it’s a complete system transformation. Designed to keep your system up to speed with today’s multitasking demands that often require instant and simultaneous connections with friends, apps, websites, downloads, and playlists, the Crucial M500 delivers nearly instantaneous boot times, powerful data transfer speeds, increased multitasking capability, and rock-solid reliability – all at an affordable price. Available in capacities up to terabyte-class, the Crucial M500 has passed hundreds of SSD quality tests and over a thousand hours of prerelease validation testing. Don’t settle for anything less.
$ 363.46
It’s good!,
This is my first SSD. I had been waiting for one affordable yet big enough that daily operations wasn’t extremely painful due to small size. I get FAR more iops in every size range than my four disk sata or SAS10k raid00 arrays. IO wise, this single SSD achieves 350MB/sec transfer rates, while my spinning disks get about 450MB/sec. That in its-self is impressive since it’s a single device vs four.
I’m pretty happy with it, the system is a little snappier than it was before. Boot times are improved. Installation was no different than it would have been with a spinning disk. I’ll probably get one of the 250GB models for my laptop.
I posted some benchmarks here: […]
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|Very pleased with the M500,
I did a LOT of research on SSD’s before deciding on the Crucial M500. My shortlist of drives was as follows.
My target computer for this drive is a MacBook Pro mid-2010 model.
– Samsung 840 Pro. This drive has a very good reputation, but it is by far the most expensive of the drives I considered. It has faster overall performance than the other drives I looked at, but that doesn’t matter to me as my laptop is only capable of SATA-2 speeds.
– Samsung 840. The cheapest drive I considered. The 840 (non-pro) uses TLC NAND memory which is not as long lasting as MLC. Even though it probably wouldn’t be an issue, I decided to stay away from it.
– Crucial M4. This 2-year-old drive originally had numerous firmware problems, but those have been ironed out and the drive now enjoys a healthy reputation. This drive was about the same price as the M500. The advantage would be tried-and-true technology, the disadvantage is that it is now outdated technology.
– Crucial M500. Very new, thus a bit of an unknown. If you read the various in-depth reviews, there are pluses and minuses . Not quite as blazing fast as some of the others. But it boasts some nice enterprise-level features not found on other consumer drives (RAIN parity protection and sudden power-loss handling). The AnandTech review points out, “The 840 Pro comparison is interesting because Samsung manages better average performance, but has considerably worse consistency compared to the M500.”. So nothing is quite black and white.
I ended up choosing the M500 because a) Crucial (Micron) has a good reputation for overall reliability, b) the drive has some interesting features and attributes that make it stand out, c) it uses traditional MLC NAND and d) the price point is quite good. A very important consideration for me is reliability and this is where I had the most difficulty in deciding among the drives. Both Samsung and Crucial have very good reputations for reliability (again, Crucial had some firmware problems early on with the M4, but those were fixed). Yet both companies have less than perfect records. Devices fail for one reason or another. I just hope I have a good experience (and I will update my review if I ever run into any problems).
The M500 was VERY easy to install. Here is the process I used:
1) I used a “Vantec NexStar TX 2.5-Inch SATA to USB 2.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure” to connect the M500 to my laptop directly out of the box. For this purpose, I just used the connector, however the full enclosure can be used later on to turn the old hard drive into a portable USB drive for backup, etc.
2) Next, I opened Disk Utility on the MacBook and connected the drive via USB. It said the drive is unrecognized and needed to be initialized. After it was initialized, I selected the drive and created a single partition, setup as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
3) I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my current drive image to the M500. This took several hours to complete. Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) can be downloaded from bombich.com. Following the drive swap, the old hard drive can be used to store ongoing CCC backups (always backup your data!).
4) The scary part (though it was surprisingly easy) was to open the MacBook and swap the drives out. I used the “TEKTON 2830 Everybit Tool Kit for Electronics, Phones and Precision Devices, 27-Piece” to get the proper bits. And I used the appropriate guide from ifixit.com.
5) When I started up the first time with the new drive installed, I opened System Preferences and set the Startup Disk to the new M500 drive (if you don’t do this, startup may not be as fast). Also, I used Chameleon SSD Optimizer to enable TRIM support on OS X.
Super fast, feels like having a new machine. Much quieter. No worries anymore about bumping the table and wiping out my fragile hard drive.
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|960GB is BEST combination of Capacity, Speed, Security and Price for TB-class SSD! – Updated!,
This review is for the 960GB version of the M500. This drive represents a great combination of capacity, speed and cost, by far the best combination if you need the 1TB size as I do.
I’ve owned many SSDs over recent years, using them both as primary drives in laptops and desktops, as well as a few for archive storage. Most have been 512GB in size, as my laptop usage involves LOTS of video and other large file size work. For several years I’ve felt the pinch of the 512GB limit in SSD drive size. Yes, you could spend a couple grand or more on some specialty drives that were TB class, but I could not justify the cost. So, I’ve been hungry for a drive just like the Crucial M500, and was very excited to see it come to market. Pro’s and Con’s below.
Pro’s
+Only “affordable” TB class SSD. Outstanding value given size and speed!
+Fast in the absolute, and faster than expected for size (see benchmarks, below).
+7mm thickness means fits in many more current laptops
+General reputation for reliability from Crucial and the Micron/Intel joint venture that produces the NAND chips used as storage in Crucial drives.
+960 GB configuration is an optimum size for the Marvel controller, meaning this size drive (and perhaps the 480GB) will provide the highest speeds within the M500 series of drives. Smaller drives will drop off a bit in speed due to lower degree of parallel processing for the combination of controller channels and number of NAND chips used.
+Encryption and ATA Password security features work well. Many other security features for other scenarios (e.g., works with Windows 8 and BitLocker to enable fast hardware based encryption, though I did not test the latter).
Con’s
-Lower write cycle life for 20nm NAND chips. This generation of SSD NAND chips is from 20nm fab process, meaning *rated* write cycles are down vs. older, lower resolution fab processes (rating from Crucial is 72 total TB written, which they translate to 40GB/day for 5 years, or more importantly as an absolute measure, 75 write cycles per NAND byte). Practically, this may mean nothing to a specific user, who will outgrow the drive before exceeding the write life of the memory, but worth noting if you have some application that is going to write many 100’s of GB/day to the drive.
Benchmark in my HP Elitebook 2760p (QM67 chipset, 6 GB/s SATA3 connection to HD)
Crucial M500 960GB SSD
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CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
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* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]
Sequential Read : 455.903 MB/s
Sequential Write : 425.904 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 403.298 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 403.500 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 19.397 MB/s [ 4735.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 49.204 MB/s [ 12012.7 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 250.442 MB/s [ 61143.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 254.621 MB/s [ 62163.3 IOPS]
Test : 1000 MB [C: 47.1{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3} (421.3/894.0 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2013/06/19 14:35:06
OS : Windows 7 Enterprise Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
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For comparison, here are the results for the excellent Samsung 830 512GB SSD that was replaced by the M500
Samsung 830 512GB SSD
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CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
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* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]
Sequential Read : 357.185 MB/s
Sequential Write : 394.004 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 278.830 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 327.789 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 16.308 MB/s [ 3981.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 36.488 MB/s [ 8908.1 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 288.206 MB/s [ 70362.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 142.322 MB/s [ 34746.6 IOPS]
Test : 1000 MB [C: 83.8{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3} (395.3/471.6 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2012/04/16 9:28:01
OS : Windows 7 Enterprise Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
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Net, HIGHLY recommended for everyday use!
******************June 22, 2013 update – Security/Encryption features ****************
Using the M500 Hardware Encryption feature via an ATA Password (aka, Hard Drive or Drive Lock)
Just enabled an ATA hard drive password to take advantage of the Self Encrypting Drive and AES256 Hardware Encryption security features…
Read more
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