Review: Crucial M500 480GB

Great value for moneyGood performanceCapacitors to stop drive errors with power cutTemperature monitorM4 series quicker in some benchmarks

Crucial's latest range of SSDs, replacing the highly successful M4 series, is here. The Crucial M500 family consists of four capacities: 120GB, 240GB, 480GB and the flagship 960GB. That top drive is the first terabyte-class SSD aimed at consumers, and it makes it one of the most important ranges to arrive on the market.

We're excited because it gives us a glimpse of what the future might hold when it comes to the cost-per-gigabyte pricing of SSDs. Crucial's new drives can do this because they use the latest development in NAND technologies - 128Gb (16GB per 2-bit MLC die) density chips. Why is this is so important?

Well, 128Gb density NAND holds the promise of allowing for large capacity SSDs at competitive prices in the consumer market space - something of a holy grail for SSD manufacturers.

To push home the advantage of this special high-density NAND, Crucial hasn't held back with its pricing, especially for the two largest capacities. The 480GB drive we're looking at here currently has a market price of around £300 / US$370 / AU$500, while the 960GB is an astonishing £500 / US$920 / AU$900. That works out at around £0.50/GB, making it a potential game changer.

But new NAND isn't the only thing the M500 brings to the table. It's also got a couple of other tricks up its sleeve - ones usually only found in proper enterprise SSDs. The good news here is that you get the added protection normally associated with enterprise devices in a drive that's aimed at us mere mortals.

First up, these drives have their own power backup. Looking at the drive's PCB, there are a couple of rows of capacitors, which - if the data is already in the NAND - enable the drive to finish any writing duties should your rig crash through power failure or some other BSOD moment.

There are also proper thermal controls, so if the temperature hits above 70C (158F), the drive will throttle back by around 40 per cent until it returns to a stable working temperature. The 480GB M500 uses 16 of those new NAND chips (eight per side of the PCB) with two dies per NAND package, giving it a total capacity of 512GB.

Crucial uses the spare capacity to sort out any NAND defects and its RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent NAND) technology. Looking after everything is a Marvell 91878 NAND memory controller, but the firmware is Crucial's own, and it's the natural development of the one written for the M4 drives.

Sequential read performance
AS SSD: Megabytes per second (Bigger is better)
Crucial M500 480GB: 488
Crucial M4 512GB: 493
Kingspec Challenger E3000 80GB: 510
Seagate 600 480GB: 513

Sequential write performance
AS SSD: Megabytes per second (Bigger is better)
Crucial M500 480GB: 408
Crucial M4 512GB: 259
Kingspec Challenger E3000 80GB: 325
Seagate 600 480GB: 437

4K random write performance
AS SSD: Megabytes per second (Bigger is better)
Crucial M500 480GB: 59.6
Crucial M4 512GB: 83.1
Kingspec Challenger E3000 80GB: 18.3
Seagate 600 480GB: 54.4

Crucial quotes a sequential read speed for the 480GB drive of up 500MB/s (the same as all the other drives in the range), while the sequential write speed is quoted at 400MB/s. That is a tad on the conservative side when compared with the results we got from the ATTO benchmark - 539MB/s for sequential reads and 429MB/s for writes.

Crucial's M500 series offers a glimpse of what the future might hold with the pricing of large capacity SSDs, and is a sign of how far the market has come in a short space of time.

If you'd have said barely a year ago that you'd be able to buy a 480GB SSD for under £300, several people in white coats would have escorted you to a nice padded cell.

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Review: Seagate 600 480GB

Good speedsDecent price (although Crucial drive is cheaper)Bad timing with Crucial's latest drives undercutting these

You might think Seagate's only venture into the murky world of SSDs came with its Momentus XT SSHD (solid state hybrid drive).

The storage company has been plugging away with this hybrid experiment for quite a while with varying degrees of success, and while the lack of pure-blood SSDs is true for the consumer market segment, it's a different story in the enterprise segment - Seagate has been producing pure SSDs for a long time.

Now it has taken the plunge and launched the 600 series of pure solid state drives for the bloodletting arena that is the consumer SSD market space. The 600 series is currently available in three capacities: 120GB, 240GB and the flagship 480GB model we're looking at here.

Opening the drive reveals that everything is built on one side of the PCB. At one end of the board sit the eight NAND chips that make up the drive's capacity. These are the latest Type C 19nm Toggle MLC 64GB chips from Toshiba. At the other end of the board is the LM87800AA controller, and underneath that you'll find the cache in the shape of two 256MB DDR2 memory chips.

For the 600 series, Seagate has used a Link-A-Media (LAMD - now SK Hynix) LM87800AA eight-channel controller to take care of things. This isn't a new controller - Corsair used it for its Neutron and Neutron GTX range of drives - but more to the point it's the controller Seagate uses in its Pulsar.2 enterprise drives. In fact Seagate was also involved with LAMD in the silicon's original development.

Sequential read performance
AS SSD: Megabytes per second (Bigger is better)
Seagate 600 480GB: 513
Crucial M500 480GB: 488
Kingspec Challenger E3000: 480

Sequential write performance
AS SSD: Megabytes per second (Bigger is better)
Seagate 600 480GB: 437
Crucial M500 480GB: 408
Kingspec Challenger E3000: 325

4K random write performance
AS SSD: Megabytes per second (Bigger is better)
Seagate 600 480GB: 14.8
Crucial M500 480GB: 22.5
Kingspec Challenger E3000: 22.4

Performance-wise, Seagate quotes up to 500MB/s for the sequential reads across the range, and up to 400MB/s for sequential writes for the 480 and 240GB models. The 120GB model's write performance drops to 300MB/s, though.

These figures are pretty much consistent with the ATTO benchmark: 506MB/s for the reads, with a slightly better than quoted 448MB/s write performance. Looking at the AS SSD benchmark, it's a similar story: 513MB/s reads and 437MB/s writes for the headline sequential performance.

The controller doesn't seem to care what type of data is being passed to it either; switching to the compressed data test in AS SSD gives up a sequential read speed of 512MB/s, and a write speed of 446MB/s.

It's good to finally see another major player in the storage sector enter the bear pit that is the consumer SSD market - and Seagate's 600 series looks pretty damn good from the off.

The only problem is Crucial has launched its M500 series at the same time, and its high-density drives represent a potential line in the sand for the consumer SSD segment. The two largest drives in the Seagate range offer a highly competitive price per gigabyte that consumers could only dream about a year or so ago.

You can't help feeling sorry for Seagate, though. Here it is, offering a new line of drives with some pretty competitive pricing, and Crucial comes along and cuts it (and to be fair everybody else) off at the knees with the impressive M500 series.

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Review: Seagate 600 480GB

Good speedsDecent price (although Crucial drive is cheaper)Bad timing with Crucial's latest drives undercutting these

You might think Seagate's only venture into the murky world of SSDs came with its Momentus XT SSHD (solid state hybrid drive).

The storage company has been plugging away with this hybrid experiment for quite a while with varying degrees of success, and while the lack of pure-blood SSDs is true for the consumer market segment, it's a different story in the enterprise segment - Seagate has been producing pure SSDs for a long time.

Now it has taken the plunge and launched the 600 series of pure solid state drives for the bloodletting arena that is the consumer SSD market space. The 600 series is currently available in three capacities: 120GB, 240GB and the flagship 480GB model we're looking at here.

Opening the drive reveals that everything is built on one side of the PCB. At one end of the board sit the eight NAND chips that make up the drive's capacity. These are the latest Type C 19nm Toggle MLC 64GB chips from Toshiba. At the other end of the board is the LM87800AA controller, and underneath that you'll find the cache in the shape of two 256MB DDR2 memory chips.

For the 600 series, Seagate has used a Link-A-Media (LAMD - now SK Hynix) LM87800AA eight-channel controller to take care of things. This isn't a new controller - Corsair used it for its Neutron and Neutron GTX range of drives - but more to the point it's the controller Seagate uses in its Pulsar.2 enterprise drives. In fact Seagate was also involved with LAMD in the silicon's original development.

Sequential read performance
AS SSD: Megabytes per second (Bigger is better)
Seagate 600 480GB: 513
Crucial M500 480GB: 488
Kingspec Challenger E3000: 480

Sequential write performance
AS SSD: Megabytes per second (Bigger is better)
Seagate 600 480GB: 437
Crucial M500 480GB: 408
Kingspec Challenger E3000: 325

4K random write performance
AS SSD: Megabytes per second (Bigger is better)
Seagate 600 480GB: 14.8
Crucial M500 480GB: 22.5
Kingspec Challenger E3000: 22.4

Performance-wise, Seagate quotes up to 500MB/s for the sequential reads across the range, and up to 400MB/s for sequential writes for the 480 and 240GB models. The 120GB model's write performance drops to 300MB/s, though.

These figures are pretty much consistent with the ATTO benchmark: 506MB/s for the reads, with a slightly better than quoted 448MB/s write performance. Looking at the AS SSD benchmark, it's a similar story: 513MB/s reads and 437MB/s writes for the headline sequential performance.

The controller doesn't seem to care what type of data is being passed to it either; switching to the compressed data test in AS SSD gives up a sequential read speed of 512MB/s, and a write speed of 446MB/s.

It's good to finally see another major player in the storage sector enter the bear pit that is the consumer SSD market - and Seagate's 600 series looks pretty damn good from the off.

The only problem is Crucial has launched its M500 series at the same time, and its high-density drives represent a potential line in the sand for the consumer SSD segment. The two largest drives in the Seagate range offer a highly competitive price per gigabyte that consumers could only dream about a year or so ago.

You can't help feeling sorry for Seagate, though. Here it is, offering a new line of drives with some pretty competitive pricing, and Crucial comes along and cuts it (and to be fair everybody else) off at the knees with the impressive M500 series.

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View the original article here