Crucial M550 512GB Solid State Drive Review

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.