Page 11 - Conclusion
When I reviewed the Crucial BX500 480GB back in December 2018, I was not impressed by the drive. The reason why I was not impressed by the drive was not necessarily because it did not live up to its promise of delivering significantly better performance than your mechanical hard disk drive at an affordable price. In fact, it did deliver significantly better performance than your mechanical hard disk drive at an affordable price. Furthermore, in regular workloads such as booting Windows or loading your favorite games, the BX500 480GB was a respectable performer among its SSD peers as well. But where the BX500 480GB suffered, even compared to other budget offerings from Kingston, Gigabyte, and including Crucial themselves, was when the drive is full or under heavy workloads. The BX500 480GB was simply the worst drive I have ever seen in that category. A lot of it has to do with its DRAM-less design, but let me talk about the BX500 960GB. The BX500 960GB, despite exhibiting mostly similar performance characteristics as our BX500 480GB in our first seven tests, changed in narrative when we gave it our intense PCMark 8 Storage Consistency challenge. This is the defining benchmark that really separates the good and the bad, and the BX500 960GB delivered 240%, 159%, and 48% higher throughput in its degradation, steady, and recovery phases, respectively compared to the BX500 480GB. Now we are talking! For about $120 at press time, the BX500 960GB is an affordable SSD that can replace your hard drive. With a rated 240TBW write endurance and a 3-year warranty, the deal is pretty good. But once again, Crucial shadows it with competition under their own banner. The MX500 is still faster by a large margin regardless of capacity, and with the 1TB model, you get a drive with 360TBW write endurance, 5-year warranty, and 40GB more space -- all for an extra $15 at press time.
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 960GB is a large capacity SSD designed to replace your HDD at a very affordable price, not to mention it performs much better than the 480GB variant under heavy workloads.
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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
