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.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and two flash chips, a DRAM cache chip is included, too.


Crucial has preinstalled a nice-looking metal heatsink on the T500.


While many other drives use screws, Crucial opted for a clipping mechanism that is particularly well engineered and very strong. Note the "holes" in the metal so that the heatsink can't just drift away over time, which would affect heat transfer.


Between the thermal pads and the PCB I found this sticky foil, which helps keep things together.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5025-E25 is a new Phison PCI-Express 4.0 controller with support for four flash channels and NVMe 2.0, using an Arm Cortex design. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The two flash chips are Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


A Micron DDR4-4266 chip provides 2 GB of fast DRAM for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• M.2 drives are tested with a fan blowing on them; that is, except for the results investigating uncooled behavior on the thermal testing page.

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 600 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 80% of their capacity
• Partitions are properly aligned.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.