The Crucial T500 was announced last year, as a modern successor to the Crucial P5 Plus, which utilizes an in-house Micron controller. In contrast, the T500 incorporates Phison's new E25 controller—both drives are PCI-Express 4.0. Furthermore, Crucial has upgraded the NAND flash to its newest 232-layer TLC NAND flash. Setting it apart from numerous competing drives that are DRAM-less, like the Lexar NM790, the T500 boasts 2 GB of fast LPDDR4 for mapping tables of the SSD.

There has been some confusion regarding the drive's name, with some referring to it as the "T500 Pro." However, the official name is simply "T500," without the "Pro" designation. Crucial's packaging may have contributed to this confusion as it bears the "Pro" label on the front. However, it's important to note that a T500 Pro model does not actually exist. I made that mistake too, during my T700 review, but looked into it some more for this review.

Synthetic performance results of the four-channel Crucial T500 are very impressive, just like all other Phison-powered SSDs, it even trades blows with many eight-channel drives. Phison does invest a lot of time into optimizing their drives for synthetic reviewer workloads though, which are run on a mostly-empty drive, too. Especially random writes are much better than on the competing DRAM-less drives, and mixed workloads run very well, too.

Things look a bit different in our real-life testing. While performance is still quite good here, it's definitely weaker than what the synthetic results would suggest. Compared to the Crucial P5 Plus there's a significant performance improvement across the board, which makes the T500 the better choice in all scenarios. The T500 can also beat the Samsung 980 Pro, and it's very close to the WD Black SN850 and Solidigm P44 Pro. The Lexar NM790—the direct competitor to the T500, is still a bit faster though. It is impressive how well the DRAM-less Maxiotech MAP1602 controller works, even against the T500 with a brand-new controller, and DRAM cache. Compared to older Gen 4 and Gen 3 drives the performance uplift is around 10 to 15%, and the older SATA drives are only half as fast.

Crucial's SSD comes with a large SLC cache size of 690 GB, which means that the drive will fill its whole capacity first in SLC, before writing as TLC (690 GB x 3 bit per SLC = 2070 GB). Once that cache is exhausted, write performance drops dramatically. In this state you're only getting 500 MB/s or so, with occasional drops to 50 MB/s (!). Not sure why Crucial designed the SLC cache this way, but this is certainly not the best configuration for a modern drive in 2024. Filling the whole 2 TB capacity completed at 639 MB/s on average. Many other, DRAM-less, competitors do much better here. For example, the Lexar NM790 achieves 1.5 GB/s in the same test, even the Crucial P5 Plus is faster with 1.3 GB/s. If you plan on writing a lot of data to the drive in a short time, definitely consider the alternatives.

Thermal performance of the T500 is very good, thanks to the preinstalled heatsink. While there was still a tiny bit of throttling, that happened only after we hammered the drive for almost 10 minutes with incoming writes—a highly unlikely scenario. The heatsink also adds compatibility with Sony's PlayStation 5 gaming console, to expand its storage. Our power consumption testing shows that efficiency is considerably improved over the P5 Plus, but it's still not enough to catch the MAP1602 drives like the Lexar NM790, which are in a completely different league efficiency-wise.

Crucial's T500 is widely available in all major stores online and offline. With a price point of $150 for the tested 2 TB variant, the drive is very competitively priced. SSD prices have gone up a lot in 2024, back in 2023 you could buy 2 TB of NVMe storage for $100—now the cheapest drives sit around $150. The strongest competitor for the T500 is the Lexar NM790 and similar drives that are based on the Maxiotech MAP1602 controller. Despite their lack of DRAM and weaker synthetic results, they offer better performance in virtually all real-life situations, at very similar pricing. Controllers have changed—there's no reason to dismiss a modern DRAM-less drive, just because it lacks a dedicated cache chip. Right now the Lexar NM790 2 TB is $160, a great alternative to the T500. Another strong alternative is the WD Black SN770, which is DRAM-less, too, yet offers higher performance at a slightly lower price point of $135. Other choices worth mentioning are the Samsung 980 Pro ($165) and 990 Pro ($180), and of course the WD Black SN850X ($160). SSD prices are always changing, so do look up current prices before buying something.