The MX500 is Crucial’s first SSD with flashy new 64-layer 3D NAND memory. This means that the data storage cells inside are stacked on top of one another, 64 deep. Download windows 7 parallels mac free. In comparison to 2D NAND, which only has a single layer of cells, 3D NAND has much higher storage density. This opens the door to potentially huge storage capacities, as well as making the NAND itself cheaper to produce for a certain capacity. But why, you may ask, am I reviewing Crucial’s latest SSD tech in an old-school 2.5in SSD? Wouldn’t an NVMe drive’s faster interface give the NAND more of a chance to shine? In short, yes, it would.

” Crucial MX300 is ranked 2nd while Samsung 850 Pro is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Crucial MX300 is: The MX300 is one of the most efficient SSDs on the market. The Crucial MX300 finished as one of the fastest drives in the aligned-write setting, along with the Samsung 850 EVO 1TB, Samsung 850 EVO 2TB, and the OCZ Trion 150 960GB. The Crucial MX300 was also one of the fastest drives in our aligned-read benchmark, though the Samsung EVO drives were the clear winners among the leaders.

But not everyone has a motherboard with the requisite NVMe-compatible M.2 slot. After all, motherboards with M.2 slots only started appearing less than three years ago, and as long as my nearly-six-year-old gaming PC can still play The Witcher 3 at 60fps, it ain’t going anywhere. So let’s see what the new Crucial MX500 is capable of, and whether it can upset our previously established rankings. For those of us without an M.2 slot on our motherboards, a SATA SSD like the 2.5in model of Crucial’s MX500 is our only option.

If you’re relying on a mechanical hard disk, fitting an SSD is the best upgrade you’ll ever make, but even if you’ve already gone solid-state, an upgrade could be a good idea. You may want a bit more space for increasingly huge AAA games, or fancy a speed boost: this new Crucial SSD is four times as fast in certain tasks than my old gaming PC’s 2012 Sandisk Extreme. Crucial sent me the 500GB version of the SSD to review, and, at / (23p per GB or 27 cents per GB) it looks to be very well priced. The is / for the same capacity, and the new 860 Evo (which Katharine is just about to test) is.

The 250GB and 1TB versions of the MX500, meanwhile, come in at 27p per GB and 22p per GB – again, great value. Crucial make it painless to upgrade your system without having to reinstall Windows, thanks to the included cut-down version of Acronis True Image. This reboots into its own mini operating system, then clones your current system disk to the new SSD. It worked flawlessly for me. I used a couple of synthetic benchmarks to test the SSD. My test rig is an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X PC with an Asus Prime X370-Pro motherboard and 16GB of Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4 RAM, so should be quick enough not to hold up the SSD.

The first test was AS SSD, which performs a number of file transfer tests to check different aspects of a drive’s performance. I was most interested in the Sequential and 4K Random tests.

Sequential transfers 1GB of data to and from adjacent areas of an SSD’s storage, and is a best-case scenario when it comes to measuring SSD read and write speeds. It also produces the results closest to the ‘claimed speeds’ you’ll see on an SSD’s specs page.

In this test, the MX500 read files at 514MB/s and wrote them at 498MB/s. These are excellent results, making the MX500 quicker than the Samsung 850 Evo’s 498MB/s and 453MB/s, and a few MB/s faster than the top-end. Both Samsung drives have just been replaced with the and, but while neither are much quicker than their predecessors, they are in fact a lot cheaper, likely making them better value overall. The AS SSD 4K Random benchmark again takes 1GB of data, but this time splits it into 4KB chunks and reads and writes it to random locations over the SSD’s surface. This test is an attempt to mimic an operating system’s behaviour, which relies on reading and writing all kinds of small files all over the place. The MX500 impressed in this test, too: 37MB/s when reading files and 73MB/s when writing is significantly quicker than what the 850 Evo managed, but around 30% slower than the expensive 850 Pro in the writing test.