Introduction

Crucial, a subsidiary of Micron, a world leader in memory and flash production, has established itself on the solid state storage market with their Crucial C300 and m4 SSDs. They have now released the M500 that was demonstrated as 1 TB variant using Micron's new 128 Gbit MLC NAND die at CES earlier this year.

Today, we are reviewing the 480 GB version of the Crucial M500. It is based on an updated Marvell 88SS9187-BLD2 controller and Micron 20 nm MLC flash. The new flash chips use a 128 Gbit die to increase page size from 8 KB to 16 KB, which increases sequential throughput and makes page management easier since the controller needs to store data for each page and now only has to worry about half the number of pages.

Crucial's M500 is available in capacities ranging from 128 GB to 1 TB. The M500 480 GB in this review currently retails at $395.