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Design |
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9.5 | |
Features |
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9.0 | ||
Performance |
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9.3 | ||
Value |
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9.5 | ||
Developer: Crucial Review Date: May 2013 Reviewer: James Wright |
9.5 |
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Solid-state storage (SSD) is the current future of hard drives that not only offer superior performance and improved power consumption over SATA technology but more importantly, the cost of SSD's have dropped considerably. The Crucial M500 SSD can be found online (May 2013) for around $439AUD with the 960GB version retailing around $749. Compared to what SSD's cost several years ago, it's great that this technology is becoming more and more affordable. Other versions available from Crucial include a 120GB and 240GB version.
The memory chips of the M500 use the 20nm manufacturing process
with a die configuration of 32 x 128GB. The drive itself
supports a max sequential read/write speed of 500/400 MB/s with
the 4KB random (IOps) read/write of 80,000 each. Add in a
dual-core CPU controller, 6Gbps SATA and DDR cache memory, the
Crucial M500 SSD 480GB is a muscle drive (aka muscle car) for your PC. It even
supports 256-bit AES encryption. According to Crucial, they
claim a MTBF of 1.2 million hours which works out to around 40GB
of writes per day for 5 years. In other words, your PC will
probably outdate your new Crucial SSD drive.
In terms of size, the Crucial M500 SSD is quite small and is a 2.5" internal drive and comes with a easy laptop install kit, making the installation into a notebook quite easy. Another impressive feature is that if the drive exceeds 70 degrees Celsius, the drives performance is throttled in order to reduce the temperature and ensures added protection of your data. The drive itself also comes with a 3-year warranty for additional peace of mind.
Once installed, one thing we did notice about the drive was the boot-up time. Compared to traditional SATA drives, the boot-up time of Windows 7 took only 6.2 seconds. Power consumption for the drive was also quite impressive with an idle time of 1 second according to IOmeter. During drive use, this moved to just over 2 seconds which once again proves the power efficiency of this product.
We tested the drive with a variety of benchmark programs with the first being ATTO Disk Benchmark, one of the oldest and most trusted hard drive benchmark tools. Read speeds were 555 MB/s with write around 450 MB/s. As you can see from the results, it actually excelled the recommended write/read specifications from Crucial. Another benchmark program we used was HD Tune which allows you to do a total test of a hard drive. The average read speed of the drive was around 448 MB/s with write speed 260 MB/S which is definitely nothing to scoff at. CrystalMark on the other hand had a sequential read speed of 500 MB/s and a write speed of 450 MB/s which is perfect for gaming and overall hard drive performance for your PC. In relation to gaming, the drive did load games a fractional faster than out traditional Seagate SATA drive.
Final Thoughts? However when compared to traditional drives, the Crucial M500 SSD (480GB) is far superior and with SSD become the standard now, these drives are just going to get cheaper, larger and more powerful. However if you're after a mid to high performing SSD, than we could happily recommend the Crucial M500 SSD. |