Crucial BX500 1TB Review: Low-Cost SSD as a Storage instead of HDD

Crucial BX500 is an inexpensive 2.5-inch SATA solid-state drive with a corresponding operating speed of up to 540 MB/s reading and up to 500 MB/s writing. The company's goal was creating the most affordable SSD and it succeeded. Indeed, it will be quite difficult to find the same volume and speed for the same money. The Crucial BX500 is perfect as additional storage for personal data, photos, videos and music. But using it as the main one for working with large amounts of data is not a good idea: after filling the SLC cache write speed drops to very low rates.

Pros:

• Perfect price-quality ratio
• Speed indicators correspond to the stated figures
• Support for S.M.A.R.T., TRIM and ECC error correction
• Functional proprietary software

Cons:

• Drop in write speed to very low rates after filling the SLC cache

What's with the Package?

The Crucial BX500 comes in a small cardboard box with the model and capacity of the drive on the front. On the back there is all kinds of useful information about the software, installation and firmware. Inside there is a plastic blister with the drive itself and a manual. No other bonuses. It seems that 9.5 mm drives finally became history and we didn't see any adapters in the kit for a long time.

Crucial BX500 Design

Structurally, the Crucial BX500 is a typical modern solid state drive in a 2.5-inch form factor. The body is made of matte black plastic. The front has a blue Crucial by Micron logo sticker and is embossed with the letters BX. On the back there is a large sticker with all the necessary technical information, as well as four holes for fastening screws.

The thickness of the drive is standard - 0.27 inches (7 mm). The side faces also have holes for a different mounting standard. The SSD itself is very lightweight. I did not disassemble it, but I suspect that the PCB takes up less than half of the entire internal space of the case.

Crucial BX500 1TB Performance

Crucial drives are manufactured by Micron, which makes its own memory chips. Accordingly, the Crucial BX500 uses Micron's 96-layer 3D TLC flash memory. A budget Silicon Motion SM2259XT solution without DRAM cache support is used as the controller. That is quite justified, considering the fact that the drive is positioned as an affordable solution. The claimed maximum read speed is up to 540 MB/s and write speed is up to 500 MB/s. Performance is quite typical for its class of SSD drives with SATAIII interface. Guaranteed data recording capacity (TBW) is 360 TB, which is not bad for a budget model. The manufacturer gives a 3-year warranty on the drive. 

The drive demonstrates the declared speed indicators in synthetic tests. Somewhere a little higher, somewhere a little below the "passport" data, but in general, no problems are observed in the process of work. The speed is typical for modern SATAIII solid state drives:

But when working with large amounts of data, not everything is so smooth. When writing the entire disk volume linearly, you can see that the SLC cache volume is about 140 GB. After writing such a volume, the speed starts to drop. At first, there is a jumping speed, and after filling 60% of the volume, it decreases already on a constant basis to a very low 60 MB/s, which is even more moderate than in modern HDDs. On the other hand, such SSDs are bought not for work purposes with constant rewriting and transferring of huge amounts of data, but as storage of personal data, photos, videos, music and so on. And for this purpose the drive fits perfectly. Moreover, with linear reading, of course, there is no drop in speed:

Heating is very dependent on the internal layout of a PC or laptop, but in general, 2.5-inch SATA SSDs themselves practically do not heat up. Crucial BX500 after linear recording of full volume showed a temperature of 31 ° C, so there is no need to worry about overheating:

The Proprietary Software

The functionality of the proprietary Crucial Storage Executive software is pretty standard. Monitoring the status of the drive, updating the firmware, transferring data between drives, creating a spare area, formatting and cleaning the disk.

3 Things to Know about Crucial BX500:

• The Crucial BX500 is a low-cost 2.5-inch SATAIII SSD

• Available in 120 GB, 240 GB, 480 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB

• The maximum read speed is 540MB/s, and the maximum write speed is 500MB/s