Crucial M550 512GB Solid State Drive Review

ATTO

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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.