The Crucial MX500 is the company's new flagship SSD, built upon the foundation of Micron 3D TLC NAND flash and an SMI SM2258 controller, which we've seen used by many other vendors before. Unlike its predecessors, the company opted to part ways with Marvell, which comes with a significant cost reduction in a market where price is key. Crucial has also upgraded their warranty to five years in order to match Samsung's offerings in that regard.

Like all other MX-Series drives, the MX500 offers the full range of encryption features and also protects data at rest in case of a power outage. Endurance is rated at 360 TBW (for the tested 1 TB version). This comes down to 328 GB written each single day over a 3 year period, which should be enough for even the most demanding non-enterprise scenarios. It's also worth mentioning that these drives are designed to be resilient against power-losses. While older generations of Crucial MX-series drives relied on a bank of capacitors to put out just enough power to finish outstanding write operations and mitigate data loss, Crucial's redesigned flash program sequencing for its NAND flash chips achieves the same function without the need for a capacitor bank to hold charge.

In terms of performance, we see the drive outperforming the previous-generation Crucial MX300, but not by a large margin. This means that the drive is right up there with the fastest SATA drives, which are all limited by the speeds the aging SATA interface can provide. Our synthetic testing reveals that unlike the majority of TLC drives, the MX500 doesn't suffer from the write hole when sending lots of data its way. It delivers a steady 400 MB/s even when the SLC cache is exhausted. Other drives end up much slower in that scenario (e.g.: 850 Evo & MX300 at 300 MB/s).

The Crucial MX500 1 TB currently retails at $260, which makes it the most affordable drive on the market in that capacity band with a price per GB of only 26 cents. Looks like the 30 cents per GB barrier has been long shattered by Crucial. The included 5-year warranty underlines Crucial's trust in the product, and you also don't have to worry about it failing and taking all your data with because of the data-at-rest protection. The two biggest competitors for the MX500 are priced significantly higher: the Samsung 850 Evo is currently $290, and the WD Blue 1 TB is $280. The Crucial BX300, which is our favourite drive when it comes to cost, is unfortunately only available in capacities of up to 480 GB. Now all that's missing for Crucial is to release a fast NVMe drive - they are the only major company that doesn't have such a model in their lineup. At that price, the MX500 1 TB is the greatest 1 TB SATA drive, and looks to be the SSD to get in 2018.