Page 11 - Conclusion
Is the Crucial BX500 480GB one of those products that can effectively convince you that swapping out your mechanical hard drive for a solid state drive is an easy task that will grant you exponentially higher system performance at a price you can afford? Given the technical difficulty of performing the procedure is certainly not challenging, this question really boils down to performance. From the results, it can be seen the Crucial BX500 480GB is a solid performer in linear read tests and regular workloads, so using it to boot Windows or loading Microsoft Word should prove no challenge for this drive. Without a doubt, you are going to see exponentially higher system performance compared to a regular hard drive. But where the BX500 480GB suffers, even compared to other budget offerings from Kingston, Gigabyte, and including Crucial themselves, is when the drive is full or under heavy workloads. Simply put, this is by far the worst drive I have ever seen in this category, and we are talking about a 37% performance reduction at the very least and up to 84% at the upper bound against some select budget SSDs. For about $70 at press time, the Crucial BX500 480GB does get you a lot of capacity for the money. But the Gigabyte UD PRO 512GB, no speed demon by any means but a more well-rounded drive on average, is the same price with more storage space. We can choose to ignore the Kingston UV500 480GB, given it is $90. The biggest competition, however, comes from Crucial themselves. The MX500 500GB can be had for $73 at press time. The choice is not hard. I would gladly sacrifice less than a day of Starbucks for two extra years of warranty, 20GB additional capacity, 60TBW increase in write endurance, more features, and considerably better performance in quite literally every area.
Crucial provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The Crucial BX500 480GB is an ultra-budget drive that can be had for $70 at press time, but for an extra $3, you can get the MX500 500GB -- a significantly better SSD by every metric.
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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 3.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 9.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark Vantage
10. Benchmark: PCMark 8
11. Conclusion
