Crucial MX500 500GB Solid State Drive

Model: Crucial MX500 500GB Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: Crucial
Provided By: Crucial

Crucial is a global brand of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the largest memory and flash storage manufacturers in the world. The company's product lineup includes award-winning solid state drives (SSDs) and computer memory upgrades (DRAM) for more than 50,000 systems. These products have been qualified and approved by major original equipment manufacturers and every single module has been rigorously tested at the component and module level. Each SSD also undergoes over a thousand hours of prerelease validation testing and hundreds of qualification tests to ensure optimal reliability and performance.

Earlier this year, Crucial launched its latest MX-series SSD, the MX500. Powered by Silicon Motion's SM2258 controller and available with up to 2TB of Micron's second generation 3D TLC NAND, the drive delivers 560 MB/s read and 510 MB/s write speeds for faster boot times, quicker application launches and better overall system performance. The MX500 also offers a long list of features including AES 256-bit encryption, thermal and power loss protection, TRIM support and active garbage collection. It also comes equipped with Crucial's Dynamic Write Acceleration technology, which uses an adaptable pool of high speed, single-level cell flash memory to enable faster saves and file transfers. Last, but not least, the MX500 uses technologies like Data Defense and Redundant Array of Independent NAND (RAIN) to maintain the integrity of your data and prevent it from becoming corrupted.

The MX500 is available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. For this review, Crucial sent us the 500GB version of the drive which is capable of delivering up to 560 MB/s sequential read and 510 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 95,000 random read and 90,000 random write IOPS.

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the MX500 has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Crucial's new SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the MX500 have what it takes? Can it deliver the performance and features that we've come to expect from Crucial? Keep reading as we find out.