Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

Yes, I know that you guys frown a little whenever I mention TLC NAND, honestly, you shouldn't. The MX500 series is a testimony of the fact you will not suffer from write performance as there are no noticeable enough write gaps. And yeah, endurance isn't a thing anymore either, this 1TB SSD is rated at 360 TB written for five years. You'll need to be writing close to 200 GB per day each day for five years to be able to reach that number. So, I am very content with the MX500 as a TLC based NAND storage unit. What impressed me the most is the increased overall stability of your average writes. Pretty much MX500 can chew anything you throw at it while remaining close to advertised write performance. 

Some TLC at Guru3D

The numbers show this TLC SSD is as fast as any high-end class (SATA 6 Gbit/s) SSD. I can imagine just one scenario where you'd write say 50 GB continuously, where the SSD would drop to maybe ~400 MB/sec, that's it honestly. So yes, it's green lights everywhere as this SSD might really be the one to get in 2018 as I have not revealed it's biggest 'plus' yet, pricing. We expect the drive as tested today to hover at a street price of roughly 25 cents per GB. The SSD also still has power loss protection. Where the MX300 series has hardware power loss protection in hardware by ceramic capacitors, the MX500 doesn't. Crucial states they have made alterations in its program sequencing for its NAND flash, this results (they claim) into the same functionality. So they should be able to survive a sudden power loss. I don't know. I really liked the extra capacitors (they feed the SSD power for a short period of time so it can write it's last retrieved VIVO data). Other than that it is as fast to equally fast as it's predecessor, but simply cheaper and available in higher volume sizes.

Endurance

Crucial also makes use of a dual-cache, they add a 512MB/1024 and even 2048MB (2 TB) DRAM cache alongside an SLC written cache buffer. For the 1TB model, this is a 2x512MB DRAM cache as well as an SLC write cache. Endurance then, the MX500 1TB model SSD is rated a 360 TBW and half that for the 500 GB model. That is plenty. Given the TLC written nature and if you write say 20 GB a day / 365 days a year that would be 7.3 TB per year. That would still be almost 49 years of lifespan, we're fairly certain the controllers turned to sand by then, but still. That TBW value is lower with smaller volume sizes, thus 160 TBW for the 500 GB drive and 80 TBW for the 250 model. The ever so important factor, of course, is price, you'll be able to spot this unit at roughly 26 cents per GB for our tested 1TB model, and that makes this unit among the cheaper ones to get on the market. That is an MSRP and not street price, so likely they'll be a notch cheaper as well once there is volume available on the market. So again, it'll remain to be a mid-range priced SSD, with a solid performance point of view. Mid-range these days is last year's high-end performance. And with this kind of performance, you overall remain in the high-end segment on SATA3. 

Performance

This SSD writes and reads serious amounts of tiny files in a fast enough fashion. You can notice a drop-off point once the caches really run out of stamina, but you will need to have written many GBs before that happens, and even then you are still looking at a "slow" 400 MB/sec. IOPS is not something you as a consumer should worry about too much unless you are doing a lot of database related work or create similar workloads on your PC, but this SSD certainly ranks high within this aspect. Trace testing - we think by far the best test in our entire benchmark suite is PCMark Vantage 64-bit. This is a trace test and can emulate what you guys do on your PC but then multiply it by a factor of 100, this test puts more focus on read performance opposed to writing though. The outcome of the results with the Crucial MX500; sustained read/write performance, again fine. Zoom in at both IOPS and trace performance and you'll notice that the SSD can manage serious workloads without breaking so much as a drop of sweat. So whether you write lots of small files, copy MKV movies or do it all together, the SSD remains a solid performer on all fronts.

Overall

Right, an or any SSD anno 2018 is enjoyable. Very much so. If you put a drive like this into your SATA 3 compatible laptop or SATA 3 compatible PC, you'll have no idea what is about to hit you when comparing with a HDD. We very much enjoy the grand sustained performance of this SSD series. Make no mistake, replacing an HDD with an SSD in your desktop PC or laptop eliminates the random access lag of the HDD head, it is no longer mechanical. That, combined with the maxed out performance SATA 3 offers these days, is simply a massive difference and probably the best upgrade you can make for your computer this day and age.

Your SATA controller

Some overall recommendations then. Should you be in the market for a SATA 3 SSD then we have a couple of hints. First and foremost if you have a SATA 2 controller only on your motherboard, then you'll be limited at roughly 270 MB/sec read and writes. SATA 3 (6Gbps) will free you up from that allowing the SSD to perform in the 500 MB/sec range. It is, however, important that you connect your SSD to the proper controller. Internal chipset-based integrated SATA 6G controllers are the best, thus say the Z270 / Z370 / X299 Intel SATA3 interface or the AMD X370 / X399 internal chipset interface. If you run the SSD from a 3^rd party controller like, say, a Marvell / ASMedia 6G controller, you will often see lower performance. The new AMD chipsets offer fantastic performance btw. The more recent Asmedia controllers we spotted lately on motherboards also offer good performance, albeit still 20% ~ 25% slower than Intel's controllers. Also, make sure you run your drive in AHCI mode, it does make such a difference in performance, a big difference.

Concluding

The new MX500 series will be king of the budget. It does so while offering solid performance in the 400/500MB write ranges as well and comes with proper endurance levels, neither does it seem to suffer from the TLC write hole (slowing down once caches run out). Combined with a price level hovering at that 25 cents per GB marker, this might be the SSD to get in 2018. The choice of 64-layer V-NAND and a total of 16 NAND chips helps Crucial in write performance, but they also armed it with dual-caches and the Silicon Motion SM2258 XT controller. The combination of it all seems to be a very sound one. Everything is relative to pricing, and the MX500 should be all about that. I do take some reservation in that statement, as the SSDs will become available in volume in 2018. Only street prices based on volume availability will define the sales price and thus are the decisive factor, but the light s are all green on this one from what we see right now. Lovely to see is that there will be a 1TB and 2TB volume size available. Performance wise it's mostly, all the same, these days, ergo the biggest move in the storage industry right now is the quest for more capacity and proper endurance with SATA 6 Gbit/s storage units. We need multiple Terabyte SSDs as most people will want to ditch the traditional mechanical head based HDDs with their rotating platters. The Crucial MX500 series come with a proper five years warranty as well. In closing, we have to admit, this is looking to be a great SSD. You'll receive high-end performance for a SATA3 SSD in the value segment, combined with a good price and proper endurance levels. If the pricing remains to be as suggested, this is value at it's best and as such the MX500 series will become a popular and highly recommended SSD series.

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