Introduction

Crucial is one of the biggest players in the SSD market, partly because they can use their own NAND chips paired with DRAM manufactured by their parent company Micron.



Today we are reviewing the Crucial T500, which is the company's newest PCI-Express Gen 4 drive. Back in 2021, Crucial introduced the P5 Plus as high-end option for PCIe 4.0 customers, using an in-house Micron controller. The new T500 is designed as a modern alternative to the P5 Plus, we're not sure if it really replaces it in Crucial's product stack, or if both will co-exist for a while. Unlike the P5 Plus, the T500 is built using a Phison controller, their E25 model specifically, which was released in late 2023. This makes the Crucial T500 the first SSD that we review using the Phison E25. The NAND flash chips are Micron's newest 232-layer 3D TLC design (the same chips as on the Gen 5 T700). Unlike many value-oriented drives, the T500 does include a DRAM cache chip, from Micron, as expected.

The Crucial T500 (with heatsink) is available in capacities of 1 TB ($95) and 2 TB ($153). There's also a model without heatsink that even comes in a 512 GB version, for $72. The 1 TB non-heatsink variant costs $81, and the 2 TB version is $156. Endurance for these models is set to 300 TBW, 600 TBW and 1200 TBW, respectively. Crucial includes a five-year warranty with the T500 SSD.

Please note there's also some talk about a "Crucial T500 Pro" online—this is the same model as the non-Pro. The confusion comes from the fact that Crucial printed "PRO" on their package, which seems to be marketing to target professionals, it's not a product designation.