Tuesday, April 9th 2013

Crucial M500 SSD Series Now Available

Crucial started shipping its M500 line of consumer SSDs. Available in 2.5-inch SATA (7 mm-thick), mSATA, and NGFF M.2 form-factors, the drives combine Micron 20 nm MLC NAND flash with a Marvell-made processor. All three form-factors take advantage of 6 Gb/s SATA. The drive is available in 120 GB, 240 GB, and 480 GB capacities for all three form-factors, while the 2.5-inch gets a 960 GB "terabyte-class" capacity option, as well.

Sequential read speeds on all capacities are as high as 500 MB/s, while sequential write speeds cap out at 130 MB/s and 250 MB/s for the 120 GB and 240 GB variants, respectively; and reach 400 MB/s on the 480 GB and 960 GB variants. The drives are backed by 3-year limited warranties, 1.2 million hours MTBF, and 72 TB total bytes written (TBW) write endurance (that's 40 GB per day). TRIM, NCQ, and SMART are standard issue. The 120 GB, 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB variants are priced at US $129.99, $219.99, $399.99, and $599.99, respectively.
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27 Comments on Crucial M500 SSD Series Now Available

#26
NeoXF
blibbaWell the 960GB variant of this drive will be about $599 at launch. So, you might as well say that you'd like to see the 4770K at $5. That said, we've seen massive SSD price-drops before, so who knows.

SATA3 is not an "excuse", it's a technical limitation. And besides, sequential transfer speeds are hardly the holy grail of SSD performance - you can match an SSD in this area with a few HDDs in RAID, but actually in the real world this would not be a comparable solution.

Have you not seen any reviews of PCI-E SSDs (e.g. OCZ Revodrive) or SSD RAID arrays?

Micron basically already offers what you're looking for (at a much higher price) in the form of the p320h. 1.75GB/s sequential reads.

www.micron.com/products/solid-state-storage/enterprise-pcie-ssd/p320h-25-inch-pcie-ssd
Well, seeing as I was talking about tech that isn't out yet, it's fair to assume I wasn't talking about "now"...
Otherwise I know what you're saying. I'm just talking from a idealistic point of view... it's very easy to make internal RAID SSDs (as opposed to HDDs) to increase performance, as well as capacity, if you move to 3.5" (so desktop-only either way) at least...

Those Revo drives do look nice, but I don't see them (even if money isn't the problem) as a permanent replacement for primary storage on a PC.
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#27
xorbe
What I got from the AT review was that the M500 is not always faster or slower than the m4, but that it was more consistent in latency / iops, which is a win in my book. I have a pile of m4 drives and have been pleased, so I'm sure the 960GB M500 would suit me fine ... ^_^
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