#960gbBX500

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Crucial BX500 960 GB SSD Review

  In today's market, SSDs are becoming so cheap that they are much less of a luxury and more of a standard. Both SATA and NVMe SSDs have come down in price. SSDs, in general, have become so affordable that it's now possible to replace all your mechanical hard drives with SSDs for a reasonable price.  Whether it’s just a boot drive, or you plan to replace all your mechanical drives, there are SSDs that can fit into just about any budget.  Sure, NVMe drives are faster and therefore a better choice for a boot drive. However, where NVMe drives have gotten cheaper, SATA SSDs have become even more so. As capacities rise and prices fall, SATA SSDs could eventually replace mechanical hard drives. Today, most SATA SSDs have just about maxed out the speeds that a SATA interface can achieve and many people have moved on to NVMe SSDs.  However, that's not to say they don't have a place in today's market. That just means as a consumer, you must look at the other features of a drive to make an educated decision. Aside from speeds or the capacity of the drive, you should also consider the endurance of the drive, the life expectancy of the drive and the warranty. It's also a good idea to look into the companies that offer the product you're looking at buying. Few companies have the reputation that Crucial has. We recently looked at the 480 GB version of the BX500. However, Crucial recently released a 960 GB version of the BX500. The 960 GB variant of the BX500 is sporting 96 layer 3D NAND technology, boasts an endurance of 240 TB TBW, or Total Bytes Written and a life expectancy of 1.5 million hours. We put the 960 GB variant of the Crucial BX500 through our suite of benchmarks to see how well it held up. So, let's see how well it did. Specifications Form Factor: 2.5-inch internal SSD Total Capacity: 960GB Warranty: Limited 3-year Specs: 960GB 2.5-inch internal SSD • SATA 6.0Gb/s • 540 MB/s Read, 500 MB/s Write Series: BX500 Product Line: Client SSD Interface: SATA 6.0Gb/s Device Type: Internal Solid State Drive Unit Height: 7mm Form Factor: 2.5-inch (7mm) Package Content: Crucial BX500 3D NAND SATA 2.5-inch SSD, Acronis True Image for Crucial   Packaging

  The front of the box has the Crucial logo on the top left-hand corner and their motto next to the logo, "The memory & storage experts." The BX500 branding is printed on the bottom right corner. Across the bottom is the capacity, 960 GB to the left. To the right, it states that this is a 2.5" solid state drive.

The back of the box gives you a link to the Crucial support page (crucial.com/support/ssd).  Across the top, in several languages, they have mentioned what kind of support you can get through the link. The first is data transfer software. In this case Acronis True Image OEM. Next, you can find the installation guide. Last, you can update the firmware through the link provided. A Closer Look at the 960 GB Crucial BX500 The Crucial BX500 comes in 120 GB, 240 GB, 480 GB and 960 GB variants, For this review, we'll focus on the 960 GB variant of the Crucial BX500. At first glance, the 960 GB version of the Crucial BX500 looks like any other capacity BX500. The 960 GB variant of the BX500 is your average 2.5" or 7 mm SATA 6 GB/s SSD. Like the other BX500 SSDs, the 960 GB version advertises sequential read speeds of up to 540 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 500 MB/s. The 960 GB BX500 boasts an endurance of  240TB TBW or total bytes written. That's is double the TBW of the 480 GB variant. The life expectancy (MTTF) of the BX500 is 1.5 million hours and its safe operating temperature is between 0°c and 70°c. The Crucial BX500 comes with Acronis True Image for Crucial cloning software. This is an OEM program and it works well for cloning your drive. The BX500 has a three-year limited warranty. The front of the BX500 has the Crucial logo on a sticker on the top, slightly off-centered to the left. On the bottom are a large BX that is indented into the housing of the drive. On the back, there is again the Crucial logo with their motto "Them memory and storage experts." The back is also where you find information such case the model number, the capacity of the drive and the serial number. Along the bottom are all the different compliance standards the BX500 meets. Some of these include the FCC, UL and many others. There are also four holes, with threads, for mounting the drive on a drive tray, or behind a motherboard tray. You can also see the SATA connections from the bottom of the drive. Like any other 2.5" SSD, there are also mounting holes on the sides of the BX500. This is for mounting to a 2.5" drive bay or sled, The BX500 uses the standard SATA 6 GB/s connections, It requires a SATA connection from the power supply for power and a SATA cable to the motherboard for data transfer.

We tore the 960 GB BX500 apart to see what's inside. One thing I can say positive about the BX500 is there were no screws holding it together, It simply just snaps together and must be pried apart. I prefer this method. The first thing I noticed once the BX500 was apart was the size of the PCB. Even compared to just a few years ago, the PCBs have gotten smaller and the capacities have gotten larger. Here is a comparison of the PCB from the MX300 and the BX500. The BX500 is about half the size of the MX300. Yet both are almost the same capacity. The BX500 is 960 GB and the MX300 shown is from a 1000 GB variant. The 960 GB BX500 uses the new Silicon Motion SM2259XT Controller. This is the latest SATA DRAM-less controller from Silicon Motion. The lower capacity BX500 drives used the SM2258XT. These controllers are very similar, with a couple of minor differences. The SM2259XT offers better error correction and end to end data path protection over the SM2258XT controller used in the other three capacity drives, the 120, 240 and 480 GB models. The SM2259XT controller allows for sequential read speeds of up to 560 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 520 MB/s. The SM2259XT controller also offers random read IOPS of 100k and random write IOPS of 90k. Since Crucial is owned by Micron, the BX500 uses Micron memory modules. On one side of the PCB, there is the SM2259XT controller and two memory modules. The modules on the side with the controller are labeled 8TB2B NW952. On the opposite side of the PCB, the memory modules are labeled 8VB2D NW952. The Micron NAND flash used the 960 GB BX500 is their third generation, 96-layer 3d NAND. TLC NAND is flash memory that stores three bits of information per cell. By using TLC memory, you get the benefits of higher capacity drives at a lower cost. However, like MLC NAND, TLC NAND can suffer from slower write speeds

The BX500 offers several advanced features. These features include Crucial's Multistep Data Integrity Algorithm that provides four layers of defense against data corruption. The BX500 also has TRIM Support, thermal monitoring, SMART (self-monitoring and reporting technology. error correction code and SLC Write Acceleration. SLC Write Acceleration or SLC Cache allows the BX500 to cache at SLC speeds, on a TLC drive under certain conditions. When the drive is at a lower capacity, workloads will stay within the SLC cache. The more the drive fills up, it could see slower write speeds, but only when the drive is over 75% capacity. Test System and Testing Procedures and Benchmarks Component Product Name Provided By Processor Intel Core I7-8700k Intel Motherboard Z90 Aorus Pro Gigabyte Memory G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200 MHz CAS 14 64 GB Retail Purchase Drive Crucial P1 500 GB NVMe M.2 SSD (OS) Crucial Video Card MSI Gaming X Trio 2080 ti Cutting Edge Gamer Monitor LG 27UL500-W 27" 3840×2160 @ 60 Hz Retail Purchase Case Primochill Praxis Wetbench Retail Purchase Power Supply 1600 Watt EVGA Super Nova Ps 80+ Platinum Power Supply EVGA Operating System Windows 10 x64 Pro with latest patches and updates Software Microsoft Windows 10 Professional ATTO Disk Benchmark AS SSD CrystalDiskMark 5.0 The Crucial BX500 was labeled as drive L the standard test bench we tested it on. The first round of benchmarks was run with an empty drive. The second round of benchmarks was run with the drive over 75% full. Each benchmark was run three times and we recorded the best overall scores for this review. There were no less than 20 minutes between each benchmark to give the drive time to cool down and rest. A quick side note. The threaded Q-depth tests on the Anvils Storage Utilities named the drive as a Toshiba drive, However, it had the correct letter and capacity. ATTO Disk Benchmark The ATTO Disk Benchmark utility was designed to measure regular disk drive performance.  However, its more than capable of measuring both USB flash drive and SSD speeds as well. The utility measures disk performance rates for various sizes of files and displays the results in a bar chart showing read and write speeds at each file size. The results are displayed in megabytes per second In the ATTO Disk Benchmark, the 960 GB BX500 achieved almost identical scores with the drive empty and at 75% capacity. With the drive empty, the 960 GB BX500 achieved about 559 MB/s on the read and about 516 MB/s on the write speed. With the drive at 75% capacity, the 960 GB BX500 achieved about the same, 559 MB/s on the read and 516 MB/s on the write speeds. AS SSD Benchmark AS SSD Benchmark is a simple and portable utility which helps you measure the effectiveness and performance of any solid state (SSD) drives connected to your system. It will test “Seq”, “4K”, “4K-64Thrd” and Access Time. In the end, it will give your SSD a score. 4K tests the read/write abilities by access random 4K blocks while the Sequential test measures how fast the drive can read a 1GB file. For AS SSD, we run the SSD benchmark and the Copy Benchmark. Empty Drive 75% Capacity On the AS SSD benchmark, the 960 GB BX500 did slightly better with an empty drive all around. The 960 GB BX500 achieved 524.48 MB/s on the read and 488.97 on the write with an empty drive. The Copy Benchmark consists of three parts, an ISO file, a Program, and a Game. With an empty drive, the ISO file ran at 1228.14 MB/s in .87 seconds. The Program file ran at 545.39 MB/s in 2.58 seconds. Last was the Game that ran at 1744.08 MB/s in .79 seconds. With the drive at 75% capacity, the 960 GB BX500 achieved 523.41 MB/s on the read speed and 484.53 on the write speeds. In the copy benchmark, with the drive at 75 % capacity, the 960 GB BX500 scored slightly slower than when empty. The ISO file ran at 1013.12 MB/s in 1.06 seconds. The Program file ran at 502.08 MB/s in 2.80 seconds and the Game ran at 1529.73 MB/s in .90 seconds. Anvil’s Storage Utilities Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a powerful, older, yet still relevant performance measurement tool for traditional hard drives and SSDs. The tool can monitor, and test read and write speeds on hard drives while also providing information from the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) that provides basic information about the disk and its parameters, including partitions and volumes. Empty Drive 75% Capacity In the Anvil's Storage Utility, the read and write speeds were almost identical when the drive was empty and at 75% capacity. On the 0-Fill test, them 960 GB BX500 achieved 520.6 MB/s on the read and 445.80 MB/s on the write. On the 100% incompressible test, the 960 GB BX500 achieved 518.09 MB/s on the read and 448.93 MB/s on the write speeds. With the drive at 75% capacity, on the 0-Fill test, the 960 GB BX500 achieved 518.09 MB/s on the read speed and 442.72 MB/s on the write speed. With the drive at 75% capacity, it hit 520.19 MB/s on the read speed and 445.80 MB/s on the write speed. In the Queue Depth tests, the empty drive only did better in the Mix IO test. On both the Random Read and Random Write Queue Depth tests, the 960 GB BX500 did far better at 75% capacity. CrystalDiskMark 5.2.1 “CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds.” In Crystal Disk Mark 5, The 960 GB BX500 achieved slightly higher read and write speeds with the drive at 75% capacity. With the drive empty, the 960 GB BX500 achieved speeds of 554.9 MB/s on the read and 514.9 on the write. With the drive at 75% capacity, the BX500 achieved a read speed of 559.4 MB/s and for the write, 520.8 MB/s. The BX500 essentially maxed out the capacity of the SM2259XT controller. Final Thoughts and Conclusion

As time and technology progress, it gets harder and harder to review SATA SSDs. We're to the point where the SATA 6 interface is all but saturated and most SATA 6 drives perform very similarly to one another. The best part about SATA SSDs is as technology progresses, they come down in price and go up in capacity. In both the ATTO Disk Benchmark and CrystalDiskMark 5, the 960 GB BX500 ran above the advertised read speeds of 540 MB/s and right around, or at the advertised write speeds of 520 MB/s. So, the 960 GB BX500 runs as advertised in 50% of our tests. In both AS SSD and Anvil's Storage Utilities, the BX500 was slightly below the advertised read and write speeds. However, it still had respectable results. Overall, I'd say the 960 GB BX500 from Crucial performed very well. Now, on to the value. At the time of this review, you can get the 960 GB Crucial BX500 on Amazon for $109.99, using the link below. We're finally getting to the point where replacing all of you mechanical drives with SSDs is a viable option that won't break the bank. I know personally, I'd much rather spend just over $100 USD for an SSD around 1 TB as opposed to a 1 TB mechanical drive for even $50 USD. The faster load times of even a SATA SSD, to me, is worth the extra money. In fact, I purchased a 960 GB BX500 to replace the spinning disk in my laptop and I couldn't be happier. I do most of my work on my laptop and $110 bucks I spent on the 960 GB BX500 was well worth it. amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "dewaynecarel-20"; amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "manual"; amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart"; amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon"; amzn_assoc_region = "US"; amzn_assoc_design = "enhanced_links"; amzn_assoc_asins = "B07KLD9333"; amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit"; amzn_assoc_linkid = "40ee5130fcb24059a32df0775205038d";   Read the full article