Introduction
We have had the Crucial MX500 250GB for a few months now and so it’s about time we got round to reviewing it. Crucial sent this over to us a while ago and ever since we have been running the MX500 250GB SSD for a long periods of time, allowing us to understand it’s day to day performance, and by the performance, we don’t just mean test results. We have used it as an external drive, a spare drive, and OS drive and it’s currently installed in a doc as a MacOS Time Machine back up drive.
Crucial is positioning the MX500 as a solid mainstream fast, reliable, easy to install and speedy alternative to your regular old mechanical drives. All of that is a given, and with the current crop of mainstream SSD’s delivered by industry household names, Crucial being amongst them, with Samsung and Western Digital being notable others, you are probably not going to be in a bad place with any of their Solid State storage solutions, unless ripped off by an unscrupulous third party retailer.
So before all the testing and results, from Hardwareslave’s point of view, the defining marketing standpoint of the MX500 is the lack of a “Gaming” tag or branding. We may be discussing part of our conclusion here already, but in a world of marketing picking out already in life product attributes and re-branding them as something special, it’s refreshing to see a common sense approach to marketing (if there is such a thing).
| Specification | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| MX500 250Gb | MX500 500Gb | MX500 250Gb | |
| Form Factor | 2.5-inch internal SSD | 2.5-inch internal SSD | 2.5-inch internal SSD |
| Controller | Silicon Motion SM2258XT | Silicon Motion SM2256 w/ Custom Firmware | Silicon Motion SM2246EN |
| Sequential Read | 560 MB/s | 540 MB/s | 535 MB/s |
| Sequential Write | 510 MB/s | 490 MB/s | 450 MB/s |
| Encryption | NA | NA | NA |
| NAND | Micron 16nm 256Gbit 32-layer 3D MLC | Micron 16nm 128Gbit TLC | Micron 16nm 128Gbit MLC |
| NAND Packages | 8/64GB | 8/64GB | 8/64GB |
| Onboard DDR3 Cache | 1024 MB | 512MB | 512MB |
| Capacity | 120GB/240GB/480GB | 240GB/480GB/960GB | 120GB/250GB/500GB/1TB |
| Interface | SATA 6Gb/s, compatible with all older SATA interfaces | SATA 6Gb/s, compatible with all older SATA interfaces | SATA 6Gb/s, compatible with all older SATA interfaces |
| Warranty | 3 Years | 3 Years | 3 Years |
The MX500 is produced in two form factors, an M.2 SSD, and the more standard 2.5 inch SSD. The 2.5 Inch SSD has capacities from 250GB, reviewed today, though 500Gb, 1TB and topping out at 2TB drives. Interestingly, they all have the same performance stats according to the Crucial website. This is a bit of a helping hand for the smaller drives which usually have slightly lower performance stats than the larger drives, owing to the way SSD technology works. The net result of this would be the size and cost option is no longer impacted by the top level performance stats, though this is according to the Crucial website and won’t be as in-depth as an independent review.
The M.2 products are released in 250GB, 500Gb and 1TB drives, with the lower sizes, probably owing to the NAND flash module size rather than a marketing decision. The reported speeds are also identical across the capacity sizes, so you will not have a performance impact from a smaller drive, according to the reported performance stats.
