Released in late 2017, Crucial's MX500 SSD family (which is in our list of today's best SSDs) quickly became a popular option among inexpensive drives due to its consistently high performance, at least by SATA standards. Nowadays performance-demanding users prefer NVMe drives, but there are also use cases that can take advantage of high-capacity SATA SSDs. To address such applications, Crucial has quietly introduced a 4TB model to the MX500 line-up.
Crucial's MX500 4TB model comes in a 2.5-inch form-factor and continues to rely on Micron's 3D TLC NAND memory, reports HardwareLuxx. Just like lower-capacity SKUs, the 4TB SSD is rated for up to 560 MB/s sequential read speed, up to 510 MB/s sequential write speed as well as up to 90,000 random read/write IOPS. It is unclear whether the Crucial MX500 4TB drive still relies on Silicon Motion's SM2258 controller, but it is quite likely since switching a controller in a family that is four years old does not make a lot of sense (unless it saves quite a lot of money).
As for endurance, the SSD comes with a five-year warranty and is rated for 1,000 terabytes to be written (TBW), which translates to around 0.13 drive writes per day (DWPD), or around 520GB per day. While 0.13 DWPD is rather low, it should be noted that SATA SSDs these days are not really used for write-intensive workloads in desktop environments. Still, those who need to (re)write a lot of data often should probably think twice before getting this 4TB SSD.
Crucial has not announced recommended pricing for its MX500 4TB SSD, but since the brand's MX500 2TB drive is priced at $189 at the moment, one can make some guesses about what to expect from a 4TB flavor.
