Crucial M500 480GB SSD Review

Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a new benchmarking utility that we have started using here at eTeknix, it’s completely free to download and has the ability to test mainly hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it. As well as testing the drive in a variety of benchmarking tests, it also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to give days, months and potentially even years of use in a shorter period of time to see how the drive copes in the longer term.

Typically SSDs tend to suffer with a drop in performance when handling incompressible data. The M500 however appears to handle this form of data very well with speeds that still surpass the expectations of the Marvell controller.

As seen with a set of results from compressible data testing, the drive does not appear to suffer from a performance drop with incompressible data. Looking a little more at the drive IOPS, on the write front this also appears to be higher than the rated specifications, however IOMeter will highlight this more clearly.