A computer engineer and tech enthusiast has converted his Crucial BX500 512 GB SSD from quad-level cell (QLC) to single-level cell (SLC) NAND, reducing capacity to 120GB in the process. TechPowerUp database maintainer Gabriel Ferraz shared details of his feat, trading capacity for performance and durability, in the video below. Before the end of the video, he also charts the impacts on durability and performance.
The Crucial BX500 512GB SSD is a SATA connector drive that uses QLC NAND to provide a keenly priced half gig of storage for the consumer market. Many buyers will be happy with this product as it is, especially if they are replacing a slow HDD. However, enthusiasts don’t usually warmly embrace QLC storage as it has a reputation for lower performance and questionable durability. Sometimes drives feature DRAM or SLC caches (or use part of your PC RAM) to address some of these concerns.
Crucial’s BX500 512GB SSD contains the key components of a Silicon Motion SM2259XT2 controller and NAND flash dies from Micron (the parent company).
Ferraz noted that four NAND dies were onboard his drive and they had NY240 part numbers. This data is important for the QLC to SLC conversion process. For this delicate process, an app called MPtools for the Silicon Motion SM2259XT2 controller was downloaded from the USBdev.ru site, and the correct die reference numbers were carefully inputted. In the video, we get a walkthrough of the process which results in the system seeing a new 120GB SLC drive.
With the process complete Ferraz talks us through the benefits. Probably the primary benefit in the case of the BX500 is the boost in endurance. According to his tests and calculations, post-modification the SSD’s endurance jumps to 4,000 TBW. This is a sizable increase in TBW, in the order of about 3,000%.
In performance testing, using standard tools like ATTO and Crystal Disk Mark, many of the potential benefits of the modification didn’t show themselves due to the drive’s SATA III interface. Thus aspects of performance like data transfer speeds weren’t as impressively scaled as they could have been, but we see more promising uplifts in latencies and access times. However, Ferraz seemed most impressed by the efficiency gains he observed.
Please be very careful if you feel the impulse to try this SSD mod as Ferraz says you could “kill the drive” if something goes wrong during the process.
Silicon Motion has been in touch with Ferraz, and apparently, there may be some collaboration to deliver similar SLC mode conversion abilities to M.2 NVMe drives.
