Crucial Rolls Out New M500 Series SSDs

News
By Niels Broekhuijsen
published

Crucial has released a new lineup of SSDs, the M500.

Crucial is releasing a new lineup of SSDs that will be known as the M500 series. The units will come out in three different form factors with a number of different storage capacities for each. For starters, we'll be seeing the usual 2.5" format at 7 mm thin. Beyond this there will be mSATA units as well as those with the NGFF M.2 form factor.

The drives will come in capacities ranging from 120 GB all the way up to 960 GB. All three drives will feature capacities of 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB. Lastly, the 2.5" model lineup will feature a "Terabyte-Class" 960 GB drive.

Sequential read speeds are 500 MB/s on all of the drives, with 130 MB/s write for the 120 GB model, 250 MB/s for the 240 GB model, and 400 MB/s for the 480 and 960 GB models.

The controller on all of the drives is a Marvell unit accompanied by 20 nm Micron MLV NAND.

All of the drives feature an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of 1.2 million hours as well as a total of 72 TB TBW (Total Bytes Written) endurance. All the drives are also accompanied with a generous 3-year manufacturer warranty.

Crucial has already started shipping the SSDs for prices of $129.99, $219.99, $399.99, and $599.99 for the 120 GB, 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB models respectively.

Contact Us for News Tips, Corrections and Feedback

Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

See more SSDs News
11 Comments Comment from the forums
  • overclockingrocks
    hmmmm $599 for a 960GB SSD not bad at all
    Reply
  • anxiousinfusion
    $600 960GB SSD? Forgive me, padre, for I have sinned.
    Reply
  • Au_equus
    Samsung and crucial both have good reliability but samsung has faster write speeds. Remember when the Samsung 830 256gb was 390. Now you an get almost double for almost the same price.
    Reply
  • Onus
    Hmmm, I must admit my wallet-hand twitched.
    Reply
  • Branden
    love the crucial m4, suspect i'm going to love the m500 too...
    Reply
  • pyrotek85
    Not only is that a great price for 960GB, but the read and write speeds are still very good. You don't have to sacrifice speed for capacity.
    Reply
  • WithoutWeakness
    Anandtech did a run down of all 4 capacities and 480/960GB drives perform extremely well. The 960GB for $600 is an unheard of deal on the price/GB curve for SSD's. Although $600 is still a huge price to pay for a storage drive, with this newer higher-density NAND we're getting another step closer to no longer requiring a small SSD for the OS and a big mechanical drive for data. One fast SSD can store everything now (for most users at least) and laptops will now have options for 480GB mSATA drives.

    Higher-capacity NAND is also important for increasing the capacity of SD cards, USB drives, and other flash storage devices. 128GB MicroSDXC cards and smaller, higher-capacity flash drives are on the horizon. This is a huge step by Micron.
    Reply
  • hero1
    10643396 said:
    Anandtech did a run down of all 4 capacities and 480/960GB drives perform extremely well. The 960GB for $600 is an unheard of deal on the price/GB curve for SSD's. Although $600 is still a huge price to pay for a storage drive, with this newer higher-density NAND we're getting another step closer to no longer requiring a small SSD for the OS and a big mechanical drive for data. One fast SSD can store everything now (for most users at least) and laptops will now have options for 480GB mSATA drives.

    Higher-capacity NAND is also important for increasing the capacity of SD cards, USB drives, and other flash storage devices. 128GB MicroSDXC cards and smaller, higher-capacity flash drives are on the horizon. This is a huge step by Micron.

    This is what I am talking about. I will absolutely grab this SSD when it hit the shelves and place my current SSD into either my father in-law's MacBook Pro or my bro's mini-ITX pc that I built him. I just want to see it in stores in Canada and I will just go and grab one. Goodbye mechanical HDD!
    Reply
  • rrbronstein
    wonder how it stacks up? Its slower in most cases against the leading performance SSD's. Anandtech said the M500 took more of an endurance standpoint at a performance loss by avoiding TLC NAND and keeping with smaller MLC NAND. Their performance suffers compared to some 840 non pro benchmarks. But something about IO consistency is the highlight of the M500. Im no pro, just repeating what i read. So the M500 isnt a top performer, but regardless crucial drives are reliable and thats what matters most to consumers, my brother loves his M4.
    Reply
  • rrbronstein
    wonder how it stacks up? Its slower in most cases against the leading performance SSD's. Anandtech said the M500 took more of an endurance standpoint at a performance loss by avoiding TLC NAND and keeping with smaller MLC NAND. Their performance suffers compared to some 840 non pro benchmarks. But something about IO consistency is the highlight of the M500. Im no pro, just repeating what i read. So the M500 isnt a top performer, but regardless crucial drives are reliable and thats what matters most to consumers, my brother loves his M4.
    Reply