Crucial MX500 500GB and 1TB SATA SSD Reviews

Linear Write and Real World File Transfer Testing

AIDA64 Disk Benchmark

Over the years many people have asked for AIDA64 linear write tests to be done, so we fired that utility up to see what would happen to these SATA SSDs.

When you take a look at extended sustained write performance you’ll see that the performance starts out at around 490 MB/s and then significantly dropped off to roughly 390 MB/s before recovering for a brief period. After the recovery period the drive performance dropped off again and had some brief recovery period. Overall the performance was not terrible for a 3D TLC NAND based drive, but not all drives have this. Overall the average speed for writing over 256GB of data to the drive without a break was 443 MB/s.

Real World File Transfer

Before we wrap things up we wanted to see how real-world was when writing a movie folder containing seven 1080P movies over to the SSD. For this test, we are going to simply stress write performance by transferring over a 30.6GB folder of movies off of a PCIe NVMe SSD to the drive being tested to see how performance looks.

When it comes to writing large amounts of real world data to the Crucial MX500 drive we found an average speed of 486 MB/s on the 500GB drive and 479 MB/s on the 1TB model. These numbers are better than the AIDA64 linear write test averages, so we are happy with that. Crucial clearly still has room for improvement in heavy workloads like this, but it’s significantly better than their value oriented BX300 series.

We’ll talk more about that in the conclusion on the next page.