Crucial MX500 250GB SSD Storage Review

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Introduction

We have had the Crucial MX500 250GB for a few months now and so it’s about time we got round to reviewing it. Crucial sent this over to us a while ago and ever since we have been running the MX500 250GB SSD for a long period of time, allowing us to understand its day to day performance, and by the performance, we don’t just mean test results. We have used it as an external drive, a spare drive, and OS drive and it’s currently installed in a doc as a MacOS Time Machine back up drive.

Crucial is positioning the MX500 as a solid mainstream fast, reliable, easy to install and speedy alternative to your regular old mechanical drives. All of that is a given, and with the current crop of mainstream SSD’s delivered by industry household names, Crucial being amongst them, with Samsung and Western Digital being notable others, you are probably not going to be in a bad place with any of their Solid State storage solutions, unless ripped off by an unscrupulous third party retailer.

So before all the testing and results, from Hardwareslave’s point of view, the defining marketing standpoint of the MX500 is the lack of a “Gaming” tag or branding. We may be discussing part of our conclusion here already, but in a world of marketing picking out already “in life” product features and re-branding them as something special, it’s refreshing to see a common sense approach to marketing (if there is such a thing).

Specification
MX500 250GbMX500 500GbMX500 250Gb
Form Factor2.5-inch internal SSD2.5-inch internal SSD2.5-inch internal SSD
ControllerSilicon Motion SM2258XTSilicon Motion SM2256 w/ Custom FirmwareSilicon Motion SM2246EN
Sequential Read560 MB/s540 MB/s535 MB/s
Sequential Write510 MB/s490 MB/s450 MB/s
EncryptionNANANA
NANDMicron 16nm 256Gbit 32-layer 3D MLCMicron 16nm 128Gbit TLCMicron 16nm 128Gbit MLC
NAND Packages8/64GB8/64GB8/64GB
Onboard DDR3 Cache1024 MB 512MB512MB
Capacity120GB/240GB/480GB240GB/480GB/960GB120GB/250GB/500GB/1TB
InterfaceSATA 6Gb/s, compatible with all older SATA interfacesSATA 6Gb/s, compatible with all older SATA interfacesSATA 6Gb/s, compatible with all older SATA interfaces
Warranty3 Years3 Years3 Years

The MX500 is produced in two form factors, an M.2 SSD, and the more standard 2.5 inch SSD. The 2.5 Inch SSD has capacities from 250GB, reviewed today, though 500Gb, 1TB and topping out at 2TB drives. Interestingly, they all have the same performance stats according to the Crucial website. This is a bit of a helping hand for the smaller drives which usually have slightly lower performance stats than the larger drives, owing to the way SSD technology works. The net result of this would be the size and cost option is no longer impacted by the top level performance stats, though this is according to the Crucial website and won’t be as in-depth as an independent review.

The M.2 products are released in 250GB, 500Gb and 1TB drives, with the lower sizes, probably owing to the NAND flash module size rather than a marketing decision. The reported speeds are also identical across the capacity sizes, so you will not have a performance impact from a smaller drive, according to the reported performance stats.

Crucial MX500 250GB SSD Storage Review

Package - 8.5
Performance - 8
Price - 7.8
Consumer Experience - 8

8.1

We say all this because it has merit, it's a friendly marketing and support approach which will go a long way in today's bleeding edge gamer themed marketing war. From a performance point of view, the Crucial MX500 is right up there with most of the SSD world that is not utilising PCIe or NVMe technologies. It's a perfect upgrade for any system, especially if upgrading from a mechanical drive, or if you want to give some new life to an old laptop.

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