Crucial M550 512GB Solid State Drive Review

Introduction During the middle stages of last year I took a look at a SSD that, in my eyes, set the ball rolling when it came to high capacity drives and with options of up to 1TB on offer, Crucial's M500 made its statement loud and clear - you don't need to sacrifice performance for space. To follow in the footsteps of the M500 and to keep Crucial at the forefront of the SSD market, a drive that is able to offer the performance whilst costing less is what is needed. Bring forth the leaner and more refined M550. Based loosely around the M500, the M550 strives to take the performance and value one step further, with a more powerful single core Marvell controller, paired with 256MB 1066MHz DRAM and up to 1024GB of raw storage. As well as controller improvements, the NAND has seen a rise up to 256Gb dies and as a result of all these improvements, we are now looking at sequential read speeds of up to 550MB/s and 500MB/s write; with read and write IOPs levels of 95k and 85k respectively also available. The key factor though is price and the purchase price is not the only monetary figure that has been put under the microscope. With the market slowly moving over towards the mobile era, system and component manufacturers are looking at ways in which they can reduce the power needs of their products - the end goal being longer battery life but with the same strong performance on tap. This price per performance factor is where Crucial have focused the M550 at, so in addition to the power usage and to stay one step ahead of the competition, the drives will be available in SATA, mSATA and M.2 formats. The result from these focal points is a wallet that is not only happy at the point of purchase, but also further down the line as the cost of ownership is taken into account. Like any other Crucial product that I've seen, the contents of the box are to the point with little more than a 9.5mm drive spacer included alongside the 7mm slim drive. A Closer Look On the face of it, the M550 looks no different to the M500 that I looked at last year and barring the printed details, there is nothing different at all. On one side of the casing we have this simple yet strikingly designed product label whilst on the other side of the drive, the usual serial numbers and logos are found. Opening up the drive and lifting off the thin metal cover, the PCB is secured into the thicker part of the drive casing, with a thermal pad sat between to provide a better pathway for heat transfer. Whilst we already know that the M550 has more up-rated components, to the untrained eye, there is a striking resemblance to the layout of the M500. The controller and DRAM sit close to the SATA terminals whilst two sets of NAND packages line each side of the PCB. At the heart of the board we have one of Marvell's latest controllers; the 88SS9189.BLD2 single core 8 lane controller which is capable of delivering the high speeds that Crucial deemed necessary for this unit. The next major improvement comes in the form of sixteen 256Gb NAND dies from Micron Technology. These MT29F256G08CECABH6-10:A 20nm NAND packages together give this model the 512GB of space that it needs. Finally, sat alongside the controller, Crucial have given the M550 a 256MB buffer to work alongside the controller and access hot data, whilst mainly holding the logical address tables and drive indexes during use. Test Procedure Test system: Supermicro C7Z87-OCE Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3 Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz Corsair H100i Corsair HX1050W Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD We would like to thank Supermicro, Intel, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible. Software used: AIDA64 AS SSD - Compression Benchmark ATTO CrystalDiskMark Anvil's Storage Utilities RC6 IOMeter In a bid to make our testing as thorough and as accurate as possible, we are always looking for ways in which to tweak and tune our testing methodology and to give a clearer picture at how a drive performs throughout its life, I have formulated a new way of testing that gives eight times the amount of data to analyse within the review. Whilst this means that testing each drive will take considerably longer to test - nearly 36 hours in fact, the picture that we are able to build up of the overall performance of each drive is far clearer, providing a more accurate analysis at how a drive performs under different conditions. The basis around the new method of testing is to do with how the performance of the drive improves or degrades as the amount of free space is reduced. To simulate this I will first of all test the drive when it is perfectly clean and fresh out of the box. Following on from this I will test the drive at key points as the volume is filled up with data, namely 25%, 50% and 75% full. As the type of data that is on the drive is directly relational to how the drive performs, I will be using a sample set of data that includes a mixture of small files such as text documents through medium-sized files such as photos and large video files. Intel's NASPT suite that I use for NAS testing generates a 15GB block of data and as this contains a wide variety of file types and sizes, it is perfect for this application. To fill up the drive I will copy this block of data in to the root folder and copy it to fill the drive as required. On top of this I will also take wear on the NAND in to consideration and this process obviously takes a long time to perform - so long under real world conditions that it is simply not practical. In order to accelerate this conditioning process I will use the SSD endurance test that lies within Anvils Storage Utilities and read / write 5TB of data to the drive through a process of filling the drive with thousands of small files of various sizes and compressibility (with randomised duration between each of the writes), then reading each of them back with a randomised time between each file. After this has completed, the data is then erased and the process starts again. This process of conditioning the drive can take anywhere upwards of 8-9 hours on a typical 256GB SATA III SSD, however the performance and capacity of the drive will influence the time it takes to condition the drive. Following the conditioning process, the benchmarking process as described above is repeated again with the volume filled with sample data to each percentage between test runs. Furthermore between each benchmark test, the drive will be left alone to allow the TRIM command to take place if the drive feels it is necessary. From previous experience, TRIM can heavily impact the drives performance as it takes place, so allowing a period of time between tests will eliminate this factor and any subsequent false performance figures. On each page that follows with the benchmark results, I have inserted the screenshots from the benchmark results when the drive is 75% full. In the drive comparison charts, the performance at 0% fill is used as these are the performance figures that I have recorded from drives in previous SSD reviews. AIDA64 Storage AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. AIDA64 Extreme Edition provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Unconditioned Conditioned Looking at the random read performance we can see there is a clear trend that the speed goes down as the volume fills up. As the NAND also becomes more aged, the speed at which it runs also drops - in this case by 60-70MB/s after 5TB of wear. AS SSD The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system caches. In Sequential tests the program measures the time it takes to read and write a 1GB file respectively. With most of the benchmark tests showing peak performance from an SSD, I've changed AS SSD a little to now give us a clearer picture as to how the drive will perform given variable levels of file compression. Unconditioned Conditioned As the drive ages we are pleased to see that the handling of file compressibility is not affected with virtually identical traces seen in both drive states. ATTO The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Unconditioned Conditioned Between the two drive states, there is a clear difference that the read performance takes more of a hit than the write performance over the drives lifetime, with the read results only seeing up to ~15MB/s degradation. The write results on the other hand see a large fluctuation in margin with the read performance jumping up and down by anything up to 15MB/s as the volume fills up. Considering we would expect to see a more gradual drop in performance, the tests were run again at the 50% level after an additional cooling off period, with similar results experienced each time. Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison I use the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data fill. Out of the box, the M550 is one of the strongest SATA based that we've seen to date, nudging just ahead of the HyperX 3K by a small fraction on the read performance. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds. Here are some key features of "CrystalDiskMark": Sequential reads/writes Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes Text copy Change dialog design internationalization (i18n) Unconditioned Conditioned Whilst CrystalDiskMark gives a close resemblance to the details seen from ATTO, there is a notable difference on the conditioned read line. Rather than jumping up and down, the line follows a tighter trend with the performance fluctuating by no more than 4MB/s. Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison I use the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data fill. Looking at the real world performance, the M550 does show to not be the strongest drive on the read front - however if we look at the write performance, the Marvel controller shows to be one of the stronger contenders. Anvil's Storage Utilities 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. Unconditioned Conditioned Looking at the Anvils test scores, there is a slight change in the performance trends that we have been seeing, whilst ATTO and CDM have shown the read performance to suffer more as the drive wears, we find in Anvil's that the write performance suffers a lot more over time. When tested after conditioning, the 75% fill test also showed a notable difference in performance loss over the other conditioned results. Looking into the individual data sets a lot closer, it appears the IOPs performance during this test was a lot closer to that of a fresh drive than during the 0-50% tests. All other figures were positioned as expected and a repeated test give similar figures. Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison I use the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data fill. Once again the write performance of the M550 in an unconditioned state is far ahead of the competition, however as time moves on we do see the drive end up a little worse off. IOMeter IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS. IOMeter allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the 'Maximum Disk Size', 'Starting Disk Sector' and '# of Outstanding I/Os'. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the 'Access Specifications' configure the I/O types to the file. Configurable items within the Access Specifications are: Transfer Request Size Percent Random/Sequential distribution. Percent Read/Write Distribution Aligned I/O's. Reply Size TCP/IP status Burstiness. Unconditioned Read / Write Conditioned Read / Write IOPs performance over time in a large number of cases is expected to grow over time and this the case as seen when I looked at the X210 SSD not too long ago. For the M550, the story is a little different as we see a slight drop in performance instead, although some fortune can be taken that the drop is not as detrimental to system performance as sequential read and write speeds are. Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison I use the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data fill. Whilst we have seen the sequential read and write performance take a considerable hit as the drive get more worn, the IOPs performance stays rather strong with the conditioned figures well above that of a HyperX 3K that is fresh out of the box. Final Thoughts Pricing When we look at the purchasing cost of the M550, we are looking at a drive that will set you back the best part of $336.99 / £244.18 MSRP. For a 256GB drive this may look about the right price, but for a 512GB drive like I've looked at here, this price is remarkable and when we compare it to everything else, it is the cheapest drives per GB that we've had in to date. Take that and mix it with the strong performance levels but also the reduced power usage, and what you've got here is a cost effective solution for all areas of the market where solid state drives are present. Overview When I looked at the M500 last year, it was clear that price was one of the more important factors that Crucial were taking care of whilst performance was running very close in second place. The M550 that we've been looking at here is pretty much in the same boat, although the performance is almost as important as the price point throughout. When we look at the performance in a little more detail, we do see that there is a drop in performance across the board and as time moves on but it is not detrimental as I was expecting. Whilst some drives experience a rise in performance as time moves on, especially on the IOPs front, the M550 does see the reverse happening, although considering power and overall cost of ownership is key; the slight drop in performance that we see is acceptable in this instance. I'm sure though that Crucial will look at this area more in the future and combat performance degradation one way or another. Like the M500, the price as highlighted above is one of the main factors that was taken into account as the drive was designed and built, with NAND now costing a lot less than it did this time last year, manufacturers are able to pack more storage space into a tighter frame - especially when we look at the new M.2 standard, and 512GB+ drives are now commonplace in the market. Whereas users have had to decide between a large SSD or a smaller SSD & mechanical combo in the past, the price per GB of storage is now opening up the doors to the best of both worlds, with speed and size within reach for the mainstream user. The running cost is also a factor that has been built into this drive. As we are becoming more conscious of the total power draw from our systems, manufacturers are having to trim back the power whilst keeping to performance up. In the case of mobile systems, this factor couldn't be more obvious and thus we are seeing the M550 run with a battery friendly draw of ~150mW. Whilst we are giving the M550 some good merits for its performance and value, there is also the compatibility to look at. The SATA standard as we know it is slowly starting to lose its reach in the market as small form factor systems such as Intel's NUC and mobile systems such as the Ultrabook become more and more widespread. This next generation of computing requires a drive that is far smaller than what we are typically seeing today and consequently the demand for mSATA and soon M.2 drives will be much greater than what we are experiencing now. Crucial is well aware of this upcoming demand and to combat this the M550 and its performance is going to be available on each platform from launch with the same performance expected throughout. The only drawback is that mSATA and M.2 drives will only be available in capacities of up to 512GB, whilst the 1TB offering is SATA only for now. I've mentioned a few times now that as we are nearing the absolute limit of what the SATA III interface, manufacturers have had to look at ways to squeeze out tiny bits of extra performance to stay in line, but in Crucial's case the price is where the merits clearly are. The Marvel and Micron combo is clearly working and I expect the we may see more vendors following in the tracks of the M550, but for this moment in time, this is by far the cheapest high-performance drive that is on offer. Pros: Strong price point per GB Enthusiast grade performance throughout SATA, mSATA and M.2 options available from launch Lower power draw - ideal for mobile systems Cons: Performance all round does degrade as the NAND becomes more worn mSATA and M.2 drives only available up to 512GB "As we are watching the SATA III interface, the challenge of producing a new drive that offers more is become harder and harder for vendors and the result is a whole bunch of drives that are performing within the same boundaries of each other. With the M550, Crucial are focussing more on the cost of the drive - whilst at the same time keeping the performance figures up, the result being one of the cheapest high performance drives that we've seen to date." Thanks to Crucial for providing this review sample. Call Send SMS Add to Skype You'll need Skype CreditFree via Skype