Page 11 - Conclusion
Featuring the same Silicon Motion SM2258 controller found in the BX300 and Micron's latest 256Gb 64-layer 3D TLC NAND ICs, did the MX500 deliver a new level of balance in performance, features, and price? Going through all three factors, I have to say I am a bit confused about the role of which the MX500 plays. Traditionally, Crucial's MX series sits above the BX series; where the MX series are mainstream drives for people who want a bit of everything without breaking the bank. The BX series are budget drives where cost is pretty much everything. But if you look at the actual pricing on Crucial's website, you will find that the BX300 480GB runs for $145 at press time, while the MX500 500GB undercuts it by $15 when writing this review. It is not like Crucial cut back on the feature list though: The MX500 still offers native Microsoft eDrive support, power loss protection, and a generous 5-year warranty compared to the BX300's three. Furthermore, the MX500 500GB has slightly better write endurance at 180TBW than the BX300's 160TBW. What changed? Let us look at the performance. The BX300 uses more expensive MLC flash, whereas the MX500 uses Micron's latest TLC flash. The results are telling in our benchmarks. The BX300 outperformed the MX500 by a considerable margin in our punishing PCMark 8 Storage Consistency test. Other tests the BX300 is better than the MX500 include Crystal Disk Mark and AIDA64 Disk Benchmark. Thankfully, this does not mean the MX500 is a performance slouch. It beat the MX300 by a very wide margin in PCMark 8 Storage Consistency and mostly met or exceeded the BX300, MX200, and MX300 in the rest of our benchmarks virtually across the board. In the past, the Crucial MX series represented a well-rounded product in performance, features, and price in the SSD world. Given the MX400 literally never existed and let us pretend the MX300 never did either, the MX500 for $130 is yet another excellent product from Micron that continues this tradition.
Crucial provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
APH equal.balance Award
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.
Crucial is back: The MX500 is the budget to mainstream SSD to beat in 2018; continuing the company's excellent tradition of well-rounded balance of performance, features, and price.
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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 4.60
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 9.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark Vantage
10. Benchmark: PCMark 8
11. Conclusion
