The Crucial M550 SSD Review: Striking Back With More Performance
Crucial's M500 brought mainstream performance, enhanced features, and rock-bottom pricing together in one of the most-recommended SSDs of 2013. Following up, Crucial has a refined version called the M550, juiced-up for performance-hungry enthusiasts.
Inside Of Crucial's M550 SSD
There wasn't any reason to change the M550's chassis. It's not the nicest-looking enclosure I've ever opened up, but it's all-metal, and it works well. My biggest complaint is probably that the foil label scratches easily, making it hard to get a good picture.
The PCB (Front)
This is the 512 GB drive's PCB, and it looks pretty similar to the M500. Most notable are the eight placements of Micron flash. Each package hosts 32 GB of capacity, with two 128 Gb dies each.
The 256 GB model is configured with as many packages. But instead of utilizing 128 Gb parts, it's built on a foundation of 64 Gb dies. With all else equal, the two SSDs should perform pretty much identically (Crucial wasn't able to send a sample for testing).
The PCB (Back)
All of the action happens on the back of the PCB, where you see the other memory packages, along with Micron's data cache and Marvell's updated controller.
In a play to reduce power consumption, that cache is low-power DRAM. The 1024 GB M550 comes equipped with 1024 MB of LPDDR3, while the pictured 512 GB drive includes 512 MB. Crucial's 256 GB M550 also includes 512 MB, though it really only uses half of that. Most of the space is used for mapping anyway; only a few MB of the capacity goes to caching information.
A familiar bank of surface-mount capacitors provide the M550 with power-loss protection, which you don't always see on desktop-oriented drives. Intel's SSD 730 was the most recently-reviewed example of an enthusiast drive with this functionality, and its solution is stouter than Crucial's. However, it's also found on a drive that costs twice as much per gigabyte as the M500.
This is IM Flash Technologies' L85 NAND, used by both Intel and Micron.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Marvell's 88SS9189 controller is more of a black box. There isn't much technical data about it available, but we believe it's manufactured using a smaller process by TSMC. Almost without question, it exists as a refinement of the 88SS9187, and we know it helps propel the M550 to better benchmark results.
Current page: Inside Of Crucial's M550 SSD
Prev Page Introducing Crucial's M550 Performance SSD Family Next Page RAIN: Protecting Against Small NAND Failures-
ikyung Heard rumors of Samsung planning to market the 850 with aggressive pricing this year. Would like to see Crucial and Samsung duke it out in pricing.Reply -
cryan ReplyHeard rumors of Samsung planning to market the 850 with aggressive pricing this year. Would like to see Crucial and Samsung duke it out in pricing.
They already have IMHO. The Samsung 840 EVO is significantly cheaper than it was at launch. It and the M500 have seemed to move in lockstep. Along the way, we've seen other manufacturers follow suit. Even Intel's 530 series, which has been on the more expensive side of mainstream products has been seen for just $140 for the 240 GB version here in the State.Regards,Christopher Ryan -
venk90 INSANELY GOOD DEAL ON AMAZON ! The 512 GB SSD is listed at 169$ incorrectly ! Grab them before they change it. I ordered 20 myself ! Will e-bay all of it or feel bad and return it to Amazon !Reply -
cryan ReplyI just splashed $250 (delivered to Oz) on a M500 480GB mSATA, eh, can't complain.
I hope Crucial continues to sell the M500 right where it is. The deals are just too good, and it'd be truly sad were Crucial/Micron to up the price on us.And they're not slow. I know it seems like they're sub par compared to some of the last few drives we've tested, but the reality is most users are never going to notice the speeds between different SSD models. The only exception is jumping from an older SATA II drive to a modern SATA III SSD. Even then, you'd need solid hardware in the system.Regards,Christopher Ryan -
Ankursh287 M500 available at $240 (amazon)..damn good drive for the price, performance difference between M500 , M550 & 840/840 pro won't visible to normal user.Reply -
Nada190 When I look at SSD's I want price to performance because I won't even notice a difference.Reply -
Drejeck Specifically for gaming which would be the best? All sort of tricks are allowed, from tweaks to samsung's magician (ram caching).Reply -
RedJaron ReplyOf course, we're in the throes of post-launch pricing. In a few weeks, it's possible that the gap between M500 and M500 will narrow.
Typo on the last page. One of those should be 550.
Happy to see Crucial with this update. I'm with a lot of people, you don't see a difference in SSD performance outside benchmarks. Give me something reasonably fast with great durability and I'm sold. With all this talk of the maturing of 20nm manufacturing, I'd love to see an M500 V2 with less overprovisioning.
-
gizmoguru Hay Tom's the chart for Sequential Reads Benchmark is labled "Random Writes", please correctReply