Crucial MX500 250GB SATA M.2 Internal SSD – CT250MX500SSD4

De m.2 SSD-disk in m’n laptop met een capaciteit van 120 GB raakte langzamerhand vol. Dit is een uitstekende vervanging, waarmee ik de capaciteit ruim verdubbel. Dankzij een MS-account waren de licenties van Windows en Office snel weer geactiveerd. Blij met aankoop, razendsnel geleverd tegen een heel nette prijs!

I will go into in-depth detail on any item since other popular reviews have given excellent information, so in quick summary:
My Build (all components work flawlessly):
1. Zalman ATX Mid Tower Case R1 (Nice looking case, provides room for everything, adequate cooling and allows good cable management).

2. ASUS ROG STRIX Z370-H GAMING LGA1151 DDR4 HDMI DVI M.2 Z370 ATX Motherboard with Gigabit LAN and USB 3.1 for 8th Generation Intel Core Processors (Great expandability and room for future upgrades, enough USB ports for most applications).

3. EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti GAMING, 8GB GDDR5, EVGA OCX Scanner OC, White LED, DX12OSD Support (PXOC) Graphics Card 08G-P4-5670-KR (Great balance of price and performance).

4. Intel Core i7-8700 Desktop Processor 6 Cores up to 4.6GHz Turbo LGA1151 300 Series 65W BX80684i78700 (Came with a thermal solution (fan) but I used the Cooler Master – see below).

5. 2 of Crucial MX500 500GB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch Internal SSD – CT500MX500SSD1(Z) (Man this is fast, Win10 boots in about 5/6 secs. and programs open fast as well).

6. Crucial MX500 500GB 3D NAND SATA M.2 Type 2280SS Internal SSD – CT500MX500SSD4

7. CORSAIR TX Series TX850M 850W 80+ Gold Modular Power Supply (Adequate power supply for into the future and has ample connectors).

8. Corsair LPX 32GB DRAM 3000MHz C15 Memory Kit for DDR4 Systems (Adequate for my application for work and gaming)

9. Cooler Master Hyper RR-212E-20PK-R2 LED CPU Cooler with PWM Fan, Four Direct Contact Heat Pipes (Instructions are poor, system builders with experience will have no problem, first timers will eventually figure it out. Comes w. all you need including thermal paste).

10. ASUS MX239H 23-Inch, Full HD 1920×1080 IPS, Audio by Bang & Olufsen ICEpower HDMI VGA Frameless Monitor (Really nice monitor for the price though those heavy gamers will want something far superior. Built in Audio is good enough for You Tube and regular use, but I personally find its not so good for Netflix, look at some decent speakers based on your needs).

11. Sabrent 74-In-1 3.5″ Internal Flash Media Card Reader/writer with USB Port , Black (CR-USNT) (For the cost and convince you can’t go wrong).

12. Asus DRW-24B1ST-KIT 24x Internal DVD Burner + Nero 12 Essentials Burning Software + Sata Cable Kit (Obsolete in some ways but good to have at times as some persons still give work items on CD).

13. Backlit Gaming Mouse, Gaming Keyboard, Large Gaming Mouse Pad, PC Computer Gaming Headset with Microphone Combo, S101-BA Redragon RGB LED Backlit 104 Key Gaming Keyboard with Wrist Rest (No issues at all, good feel and responsiveness and mouse drivers are available on the website. The headset sounds good).

There are a lot of good reviews on the performance of this drive, and I think that’s great. So I’m not going to go in detail about the performance numbers.

My System:
Dell XPS 9343
Intel i5
8GB RAM
OS -> Ubuntu Mate 19.04

—-INSTALLATION—-
Installation was very easy. I popped off the back of my laptop, unscrew a screw, took out the old ssd, put this ssd in, screw back on, pop on the back. Simple as that.
The MATE installation was very smooth. USB booted up right away, installed MATE, and that’s it. All in all it took maybe a hour from installing the SSD to installing Mint. Obviously getting packages, customizing the settings, etc… all took much more of my time, but that’s not the part of this review.

—-PERFORMANCE (SATA only, no NVMe slot)—-
Original SSD: Samsung SSD PM871 256GB M.2.

– Didn’t really have a problem with this driver. It was the OEM (came with laptop purchase). I used to have dual boot Windows 10/Ubuntu 18.04 and did a SSD performance test on it (from Windows) a while back. I don’t remember the result, but it was really not “THAT” bad compared to Samsung 860 EVO. I originally had 860 EVO in mind before MX500. MX500 at the time of purchase was over $20 cheaper with only a tad less in performance overall compared to the 860 EVO. I decided not to dual boot this time because Windows 10 just took up too much resources that this machine does not have (at least for what i do). I also decided to install MINT instead of Ubuntu because it’s just far more light weight.

SO basically, I don’t think this is a fair comparison since the drivers were used in different circumstances, but here it goes:
– Boot up time a several seconds faster on MX500.
And that’s it. I use Dropbox to store my codes and I rarely do large disk write/read. I really can’t tell you any real life performance difference between the MX500 and OEM Samsung PM871. There were performance boost overall in daily usage, but that’s most likely from using a lighter weight distro than the driver itself. My reason for buying new SSD was purely for reliability (PM871 was several years old). My reason for buying MX500 over 860 EVO (or other brands) was the price per performance. This is an older laptop that I use primarily for linux environment because I rather not use VM’s if I don’t have to. I didn’t need super fast SSD (which is an oxymoron since NVMe’s exist, so there’s no such thing as a “fast” SATA m.2. SSD) for that reason. For actual daily driver (for other coding and personal use) I have my macbook pro.

Reviews throw a lot of numbers at you and crap, but hardly go over real life performance or even real life scenarios. Real life performance can be subjective because it’s based on perception when it’s not an obvious difference. The numbers, of course, validate that. I did not see a drastic performance boost in real life performance. As for real life scenarios, how many of you normal users are actually moving around 100’s of GB’s of data every day/week???? These numbers really only matter for daily users if you do content creation (i.e. Youtuber), data analysis, and the likes.

I guess to sum this part up… Don’t bother going for the more expensive and faster SATA m.2. SSD’s unless you are one of those people. AND EVEN THEN, FOR YOUR SANITY… If you are still on a SATA m.2 ONLY system, please upgrade your system. The worse NVMe drivers are significantly better than the fastest SATA m.2 driver.

Speed Test samples
**********************************************************
*****WRITE SPEED:
…-9343:~$ sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024; sync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 2.50705 s, 428 MB/s

*****READ SPEED (from buffer):
…-9343:~$ dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 0.251535 s, 4.3 GB/s

*****REAL READ SPEED (cache cleared):
…-9343:~$ sudo /sbin/sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3
vm.drop_caches = 3

…-9343:~$ dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 1.95643 s, 549 MB/s

The write speed was bouncing around in the low to mid 400 MB/s. So not the 510 MB/s as advertised.
The read speed after clearing the cache was right about the same as advertised. Nice :).

*****MORE READ SPEED
…-9343:~$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 8994 MB in 1.99 seconds = 4508.58 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 1564 MB in 3.00 seconds = 520.80 MB/sec

…-9343:~$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 8432 MB in 1.99 seconds = 4229.38 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 1564 MB in 3.00 seconds = 521.33 MB/sec

Also ran hdparm read speed test a couple of times for extra measures. Don’t mind the Timing cached reads for obvious reasons, but if it’s not obvious then just know that it’s not actually reading from disk and that’s why it’s so high. The more accesses the kernel has to go through, the slower the read/write. (CPU cache -> RAM -> SSD/HDD) this is a very simplistic and “inaccurate” depiction.
**********************************************************

—FIRMWARE UPDATE—-
This is really for my linux users. For windows users, Crucial has a software you can install that will do the firmware update for you. I don’t know about Mac users.

So I fully expected to update the firmware on this driver when I purchased it. When I got the boot ISO ready to go, I figured let’s just check what the current version is.
**********************************************************
…-9343:~$ sudo fdisk -;
// this gives you a list of all your disk with the directory name. You’ll need to find it for the next part
…-9343:~$ sudo hdparm -i [THE DIRECTORY NAME]
// for example: …-9343:~$ sudo hdparm -i /dev/sda <— i think /dev/sda is going to be the same for most. Also it's a lower case I and not L for " – i ".

this prints on terminal something like:
/dev/sda:

Model=CT250MX500SSD4, FwRev=M3CR023, SerialNo=…
…
…
and so on…
**********************************************************
The current firmware on Crucial’s website is M3CR023.
Basically… I didn’t even need to create a boot drive for the firmware update. The driver came already updated to its latest firmware. Moral of the story, check before you do it.

—IN CONCLUSION—
That’s about it folks. Some final summary bullet points:
– Boot up is faster (if you’re coming from something that’s actually slower. I doubt you’d see a noticeable boot speed increase if you were to upgrade from this to a Samsung 860 EVO)
– $40 for 250GB (which is more than I need for linux) is just so cheap for the performance
– Performance is as advertised (meaning it goes UP TO advertised, and while I never peaked to the advertised speed, it was consistently up there)
– Recognized immediately by Linux
– Already up to date firmware
– 5 year warranty
– No real life performance boost for my uses
– Quite simply, It works :). Can’t say the same for defective units. If you get a working one, it shouldn’t give you must, if any, issues
– If your system supports m.2 NVMe, DO NOT GET m.2 SATA (including this)
– This should not be any different if you’re installing this on a Windows laptop or (older and still upgrade-able) macbooks. Well as far as process. Performance will vary for all OS and Distros.

Overall performance is good, won’t suggest it for gaming but for studio purposes, it works really nice.
If you are a creator, you do video editing, photo editing, animations (2d), then this SSD would work for you.