The test system used in this review is equipped with an Intel Core i7-6700K CPU, GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-UD3 motherboard, 32GB (16GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix Sport LT DDR4 memory, Samsung 960 PRO 512GB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 Enterprise.
To test the performance of Crucial's MX500 SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark 8. For comparison, I've also included test results from the Plextor M8V, Crucial BX300, ADATA Ultimate SU900, Plextor S3C, Toshiba OCZ VX500, ADATA Ultimate SU800, Plextor S2C, Crucial M300, Plextor M7V, PNY CS1311, OCZ Trion 150, PNY CS2211, Plextor M6V, Crucial BX200, OCZ Trion 100, Kingston HyperX Savage, Crucial MX200, OCZ Vector 180, Kingston BX100, Samsung 850 EVO M.2, Samsung 850 EVO mSATA, AMD Radeon R7, Silicon Power Slim S80, Samsung SSD 850 EVO, OCZ ARC 100, SanDisk Ultra II, Crucial MX100, SanDisk Extreme Pro and Samsung SSD 850 PRO.
As I mentioned earlier, the Crucial MX500 is based on SMI's SM2258 controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark tool measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its random read and write speeds using blocks 512K and 4K in size.
 Crucial MX500 500GB |
 ADATA Ultimate SU900 256GB |
According to Crucial, the 500GB version of the MX500 is capable of reading at 560 MB/s and writing at 510 MB/s when tested with CrystalDiskMark. While the drive had no problems reaching its rated read speed, it came up a bit short in CrystalDiskMark's sequential write speed test.
 Crucial MX500 500GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
 ADATA Ultimate SU900 256GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
The MX500 performed equally well when using highly compressible 0x00 (0 Fill) data. This time around, the drive was able to read at 561.7 MB/s and write at 502.7 MB/s.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the MX500's read, write and burst speeds as well as its seek times and CPU usage.
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the MX500 had average read and write speeds of 464.9 MB/s and 287.2 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 438.5 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that, like most other TLC-based SSDs, the MX500 uses some sort of SLC caching. The drive starts writing at about 420 MB/s and then drops to about 280 MB/s when the write operation exceeds the size of the cache.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the MX500's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 0.5KB to 8192KB and the total length set to 256MB.
 Crucial MX500 500GB |
 ADATA Ultimate SU900 256GB |
When tested with ATTO, the MX500's read speeds topped out at about 561 MB/s and its write speeds at 506 MB/s.
