SSD Deathmatch: Crucial's M500 Vs. Samsung's 840 EVO

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Micron's consumer products division, Crucial, wasn't the first brand to introduce a 1 TB SSD. But it was the first to sell one for less than a fortune, and it sports some snazzy new features to boot. We got our hands on the entire line-up to test.

Test Setup And Benchmarks

Our consumer storage test bench is based on Intel's Z77 Platform Controller Hub paired with an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU. Intel's 6- and 7-series chipsets are virtually identical from a storage perspective. We're standardizing on older RST 10.6.1002 drivers for the foreseeable future.

Changes in RST's driver packages occasionally result in subtle performance changes. They can also lead to some truly profound variance in scores and results as well, depending on the driver revision. Some versions flush writes more or less frequently. Others work better in RAID situations. In fact, builds 11.2 and newer support TRIM in RAID as well. Regardless, results obtained with one revision may or may not be comparable to results obtained with another, so sticking with one version across all testing is mandatory. 

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Test Hardware
ProcessorIntel Core i5-2400 (Sandy Bridge), 32 nm, 3.1 GHz, LGA 1155, 6 MB Shared L3, Turbo Boost Enabled
MotherboardGigabyte G1.Sniper M3
MemoryG.Skill Ripjaws 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3-1866 @ DDR3-1333, 1.5 V
System DriveKingston HyperX 3K 240 GB, Firmware 5.02
Drives Under TestCrucial M500 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02
Row 5 - Cell 0 Crucial M500 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02
Row 6 - Cell 0 Crucial M500 480 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02
Row 7 - Cell 0 Crucial M500 960 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02
Comparison DrivesSamsung 840 EVO 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q
Row 9 - Cell 0 Samsung 840 EVO 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q
Row 10 - Cell 0 Samsung 840 EVO 480 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q
Row 11 - Cell 0 Samsung 840 EVO 1 TB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q
Row 12 - Cell 0 SanDisk Ultra Plus 64 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: X211200
Row 13 - Cell 0 SanDisk Ultra Plus 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware X211200
Row 14 - Cell 0 SanDisk Ultra Plus 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware X211200
Row 15 - Cell 0 Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware DXM04B0Q
Row 16 - Cell 0 Samsung 840 Pro 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware DXM04B0Q
Row 17 - Cell 0 SanDisk Extreme II 120 GB, Firmware: R1311
Row 18 - Cell 0 SanDisk Extreme II 240 GB, Firmware: R1311
Row 19 - Cell 0 SanDisk Extreme II 480 GB, Firmware: R1311
Row 20 - Cell 0 Seagate 600 SSD 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: B660
Row 21 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 525 30 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi
Row 22 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 525 60 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi
Row 23 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 525 120 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi
Row 24 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 525 180 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi
Row 25 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 525 240 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi
Row 26 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 335 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 335s
Row 27 - Cell 0 Intel SSD 510 250 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: PWG2
Row 28 - Cell 0 OCZ Vertex 3.20 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.25
Row 29 - Cell 0 OCZ Vector 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.0
Row 30 - Cell 0 Samsung 830 512 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: CXMO3B1Q
Row 31 - Cell 0 Crucial m4 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 000F
Row 32 - Cell 0 Plextor M5 Pro 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 1.02
Row 33 - Cell 0 Corsair Neutron GTX 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: M206
GraphicsMSI Cyclone GTX 460 1 GB
Power SupplySeasonic X-650, 650 W 80 PLUS Gold
ChassisLian Li Pitstop
RAIDLSI 9266-8i PCIe x8, FastPath and CacheCade AFK
System Software and Drivers
OperatingSystemWindows 7 x64 Ultimate
DirectXDirectX 11
DriversGraphics: Nvidia 314.07RST: 10.6.1002IMEI: 7.1.21.1124
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Benchmarks
Tom's Hardware StorageBench v1.0Trace-Based
Iometer 1.1.0# Workers = 1, 4 KB Random: LBA=16 GB, varying QDs, 128 KB Sequential, 8 GB LBA Precondition, Exponential QD Scaling
PCMark 7Secondary Storage Suite
PCM VantageStorage Suite
Christopher Ryan
29 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Someone Somewhere
    I think you mixed up the axis on the read vs write delay graph. It doesn't agree with the individual ones after, or the writeup.
    Reply
  • Someone Somewhere
    Even 3bpc SSDs should last you a good ten years...

    The SSD 840 is rated for 1000 P/E cycles, though it's been seen doing more like ~3000. At 10GB/day, a 240GB would last for 24,000 days, or about 766 years, and that's using the 1K figure.

    You're free to waste money if you want, but SLC now has little place outside write-heavy DB storage.

    EDIT: Screwed up by an order of magnitude.
    Reply
  • cryan
    11306005 said:
    I think you mixed up the axis on the read vs write delay graph. It doesn't agree with the individual ones after, or the writeup.

    You are totally correct! You win a gold star, because I didn't even notice. Thanks for catching it, and it should be fixed now.

    Regards,
    Christopher Ryan

    Reply
  • cryan
    11306034 said:
    I would only buy SSD that uses SLC memory. I dont wan't to buy new drive every year or so.

    Not only are consumer workloads completely gentle on SSDs, but modern controllers are super awesome at expanding NAND longevity. I was able to burn through 3000+ PE cycles on the Samsung 840 last year, and it only is rated at 1,000 PE cycles or so. You'd have to put almost 1 TB a day on a 120 GB Samsung 840 TLC to kill it in a year, assuming it didn't die from something else first.

    Regards,
    Christopher Ryan

    Reply
  • Someone Somewhere
    I'd like to see some sources on that - for starters, I don't think the 840 has been out for a year, and it was the first to commercialize 3bpc NAND.

    You may be thinking of the controller failures some of the Sandforce drives had, which are completely unrelated to the type of NAND used.
    Reply
  • mironso
    Well, I must agree with Someone Somewhere. I would also like to see sources for this statement: "Yes, in theory they last 10 years, in practise they last a year or so.".
    I would like to see, can TH use SSD put this 10GB/day and see for how long it will work.
    After this I read this article, I think that Crucial's M500 hit the jackpot. Will see Samsung's response. And that's very good for end consumer.
    Reply
  • edlivian
    It was sad that they did not include the samsung 830 128gb and crucial m4 128gb in the results, those were the most popular ssd last year.
    Reply
  • Someone Somewhere
    You can also find tens of thousands of people not complaining about their SSD failing. It's called selection bias.

    Show me a report with a reasonable sample size (more than a couple of dozen drives) that says they have >50% annual failures.

    A couple of years ago Tom's posted this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html

    The majority of failures were firmware-caused by early Sandforce drives. That's gone now.

    EDIT: Missed your post. First off, that's a perfect example of self-selection. Secondly, those who buy multiple SSDs will appear to have n times the actual failure rate, because if any fail they all appear to fail. Thirdly, that has nothing to do with whether or not it is a 1bpc or 3 bpc SSD - that's what you started off with.

    This doesn't fix the problem of audience self-selection
    Reply
  • Someone Somewhere
    You were however trying to stop other people buying them...

    Sounds a bit like a sore loser argument, unfortunately.

    SSDs aren't perfect, but they generally do live long enough to not be a problem. Most of the failures have been overcome by now too.

    Just realised there's an error in my original post - off by a factor of ten. Should have been 66 years.
    Reply
  • warmon6
    11306841 said:
    I am not talking about Samsung SSD-s, I am talking about SSDs in general. And I am not going to provide any sources because SSD fail all the time after a year or so. That is the raility. You can find, on the internet, people complaining abouth their SSD failing. There are a lot of them...
    Also, SLC based SSD-s are usually "enterprise", so they are designed for reliability and not performance, and they don't use some bollocks, overclocked to the point of failure, controllers. And have better optimised firmware...

    Tell that to all the people on this forum still running intel X-25M that launched all the way back in 2008 and my Samsung 830 that's been working just fine for over a year.......

    See what you're paying attention too is the loudest group of ssd owners. The owners that have failed ssd's.

    See it's the classic "if someone has a problem, there going to be the one that you hear and the quiet group, isn't having the problem" issue.

    Those that dont have issues (such as myself) dont mention about our ssds and is probably complaining about something else that has failed.


    Reply