SSD by stefan @ 2019-11-27
BX500 is one of the most affordable 2.5’’ SSDs you can get for the capacity and includes a 3-year warranty with 240 TBW of write endurance. While there is no DRAM cache standalone on the board, the 96-layer 3D NAND TLC packages do include SLC for caching purposes and until this one gets filled, the SSD will perform at optimal speeds.
At first we would like to thank Crucial for sending a sample of their BX500 960GB 2.5'' SSD for testing and reviewing.
“Looking for computer memory or a new storage drive? You've come to the right place!
Crucial is a global brand of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the largest memory and flash storage manufacturers in the world. We make computer memory upgrades (DRAM) and solid state drives (SSDs), and offer more than 250,000 upgrades for over 50,000 systems. For 17 years, we've sought to provide the Crucial Difference — award-winning products, outstanding support, and a team of memory and storage experts who explain complex lingo in everyday terms. We're here to help improve the performance of your system.
Crucial memory and SSDs have been qualified and approved by major original equipment manufacturers, and every single module that leaves our doors has been rigorously tested at the component and module level. That's a big deal in the memory industry, but it's not all. When it comes to our SSDs, each drive undergoes over a thousand hours of prerelease validation testing and hundreds of qualification tests to ensure optimal reliability and performance.
To find upgrades in just a few clicks, our award-winning Crucial System Scanner or Crucial Memory Advisor™ tool will identify compatible upgrades for your system, and if you order on Crucial.com, we guarantee compatibility — or your money back. With fast and free shipping, outstanding tech support, and an exhaustive library of articles, videos, and install guides, we make it easy to find and install the right upgrade for your system.
Let us be your memory and storage experts.”
User benefits
Boot up faster. Load files quicker. Improve overall system responsiveness.
300% faster than a typical hard drive
Improves battery life because it’s 45x more energy efficient than a typical hard drive
Micron® 3D NAND – advancing the world’s memory and storage technology for 40 years
Essential performance
The easiest way to get all the speed of a new computer without the price.
Ever wonder why your phone responds faster than your computer? It’s because your phone runs on flash memory. Add flash to your laptop or desktop computer with the Crucial BX500 SSD, the easiest way to get all the speed of a new computer without the price. Accelerate everything.
Micron quality — a higher level of reliability
With thousands of hours of Micron pre-release validation, dozens of SSD qualification tests, and a heritage of award- winning SSDs, the Crucial BX500 has been thoroughly tried, tested, and proven.
1. Warranty valid for three years from the original date of purchase or before writing the maximum total bytes written (TBW) as published on our website and as measured in the product’s SMART data, whichever comes first.
2. Some of the storage capacity is used for formatting and other purposes and is not available for data storage. 1GB equals 1 billion bytes. Not all capacities available at initial launch.
Total Capacity: 1TB
Warranty: Limited 3-year
Series: BX500
Product Line: Client SSD
Interface: SATA 6.0Gb/s
Form Factor: 2.5-inch internal SSD
Specs: 1TB 2.5-inch internal SSD • SATA 6.0Gb/s • 540 MB/s Read, 500 MB/s Write
Density SSD: 1 TB
Device Type: Internal Solid State Drive
Unit Height: 7.0mm
Form Factor SSD: 2.5-inch (7mm)
Package Content: Crucial BX500 3D NAND SATA 2.5-inch SSD, Acronis True Image for Crucial
The current storage market is quite filled with M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 drives at affordable prices but also some NVMe PCIe 4.0 drives for the ones that require ultimate performance. There are quite a few mainstream systems that are sold with 2.5’’ HDDs or older systems that need upgrades and use the same form factor: for these situations, Crucial does help with their BX500 series of drives, an update over the previously launched BX300.
The 960GB version is now available to the mass market and features a newer controller, while using 96-layer TLC 3D NAND ICs from Micron instead of 64-layer found on the smaller capacity models.
The drive is shipped inside a very compact cardboard packaging, that features the total storage space listed right on the top cover:
On the back side we will get to see that Crucial advertises the inclusion of the Acronis True Image utility for disk/partition cloning from the old hardware, the fact that we are getting an installation guide, but also the detail that the BX500 firmware is upgradeable:
Inside the packaging we will get to see the small installation leaflet, but also the drive, that is kept secure inside a transparent plastic enclosure:
The Crucial BX500 drive does feature a chassis made entirely from plastic, with no fixing screws; the top cover is held with plastic clips to the rest of the body:
On the bottom we can find a large sticker with the product power rating, supported interface, the internal code name, the product serial number, the current firmware but also some additional supported standard logos:
The chassis is not very easy to take apart, especially if you do aim on not ripping apart the clips; the actual drive PCB is much smaller versus the enclosure:
One of the PCB sides does feature the controller, along with two NAND Flash ICs:
The opposite side does only hold the remaining of two NAND Flash ICs:
With the 960GB drive, Crucial has opted for a SM2259XT controller, that features increased error correction technology, but also end-to-end data path protection:
The NW952 packages are Micron’s newer 96-layer 3-bit per cell (TLC); by increasing the number of dies per wafer, we do get cheaper ICs without actually impacting the performance:
CPU: Intel I5 9700K Retail
CPU Cooler: Deepcool Captain 240 EX RGB AIO
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming
RAM: Patriot Memory Viper RGB Series DDR4
Video: KFA2 GeForce GTX 1060 OC 6GB
Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W
SSD: OCZ Vector 150
Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840
The drive has arrived unformatted:
For testing purposes, we have formatted it NTFS; here is the total remaining free space afterwards:
With the help of AIDA64, we could extract more information regarding the drive:
Blank SSD
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Blank SSD
Filled SSD
Filled SSD
Filled SSD
Filled SSD
Filled SSD
Filled SSD
Filled SSD
BX500 is one of the most affordable 2.5’’ SSDs you can get for the capacity and includes a 3-year warranty with 240 TBW of write endurance. While there is no DRAM cache standalone on the board, the 96-layer 3D NAND TLC packages do include SLC for caching purposes and until this one gets filled, the SSD will perform at optimal speeds.
As expected with TLC technology, we are again looking at a drive for mainstream users that do not write large quantities of data to it at once; if this happens and the SLC gets completely filled up, the access time will go up and writes will go between 5.5 and 6.7MB/s (as reported by Windows File Explorer):
The 960GB drive can be currently found online for just about 94 Euros!
We would like to thank again to Crucial for making this review possible!