Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Crucial T500 2TB is the largest capacity variant in the company's performance PCIe 4.0-based NVMe SSD lineup. This slots above the Crucial P5 Plus 2TB (Heatsink Version), but below the flagship PCIe 5.0-based T700 series. The T500 we are reviewing today comes with a beefy ventilated aluminum heatsink, shown in our photo above. As beefy as it is, it is still PlayStation 5-compatible, since the drive and heatsink is below 11.25mm. You can buy one without a heatsink, which will instead depend on the heatsink that comes with your motherboard to prevent thermal throttling, Otherwise, whether you buy one with or without a heatsink from the factory, they are both electrically the exact same drive under the hood.
The Crucial T500 2TB is an M.2 2280 format SSD. If you are not familiar with the M.2 physical standard, M.2 2280 means the size of the drive is 22mm by 80mm, hence its numerical designation. Its components are located on the black printed circuit board located behind the heatsink, which we will take a closer look at in just a moment. The Crucial T500 2TB works on the NVMe 1.4 logical device interface and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, M.2 NVMe interfaces with PCIe 4.0. The T500 uses four lanes for up to 8000MB/s bandwidth in each direction.
Flipping the Crucial T500 2TB around and you will see the back of the wraparound heatsink. The labels on this side of the Crucial T500 SSD carry miscellaneous information such as its model name, capacity, serial number, and regulatory certifications. This SSD is assembled in Malaysia, which is the same as the P5 Plus 2TB.
You can see what the Crucial T500 2TB is made from after removing the heatsink. There are three different components that can be seen, all located on the same side. At the heart of Crucial's T500 2TB is a Phison 5025-E25 controller, as opposed to the custom controller found on the P5 Plus. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to utilize the bandwidth afforded by the PCIe 4.0 standard. The controller also has native full drive encryption support. A Micron D8CSD, decoded as MT53E512M32D1ZW-046, LPDDR4-2133 2GB memory chip is present. It is used by the controller for system memory.
The Crucial T500's flash memory are Micron-branded B58R 232-layer triple-level cells in two chips labeled NY256, which translates to the part number MT29F8T08EULCHD5-QB:C. Its rated write endurance is an excellent 1200TBW, which equates to about 660GB per day for five years. This is the same as the Crucial P5 Plus 2TB. On a per-gigabyte level, it is the same as the other budget drives like the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB at 600TBW, but much lower than performance drives like the Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB at 1000TBW and Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 2TB at 2000TBW. The Crucial T500 2TB's rated power consumption is not published. 96GB out of the 2048GB total capacity -- just under 3% -- is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 2TB, as advertised. You will see 1.81TB in Windows.
Specified at 7400MB/s read, 7000MB/s write, up to 1,180,000 IOPS read, and up to 1,440,000 IOPS write over NVMe 1.4 on PCIe 4.0 x4, these figures are impressive even for a performance model. It is about one-and-a-half to twice as fast as previous generation PCIe 3.0-based drives. To see how all this hardware translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the T500 2TB against the big boys of this game to see how this performance PCIe 4.0-based drive from Crucial steps up against some popular NVMe SSDs from manufacturers like ADATA/XPG, Corsair, Kingston, Lexar, Patriot, Western Digital, and even Crucial themselves in the next seven pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i7-12700K
Motherboard: ASUS ProArt B660-Creator D4
RAM: Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3600 4x32GB
Graphics: ASUS Dual GeForce GTX 1060 3GB
Chassis: NZXT H710i
Storage: Kingston KC3000 1TB, Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB
Power: Seasonic PRIME Ultra Titanium 850W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Crucial T500 2TB
- ADATA Legend 960 1TB
- Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 4TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 2TB (Heatsink Version)
- Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB
- Kingston KC3000 1TB
- Lexar NM710 1TB
- Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 2TB
- Netac NV7000-t 1TB
- Patriot P400 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB
- XPG Atom 50 1TB
- XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
