Crucial M500 480GB SSD Review – A New Benchmark For Incredible Affordability And Performance

TEST SYSTEM, TESTING METHODOLOGY, AND BENCHMARKS

The system configuration for testing the Crucial M500 480GB will be Intel-based:

The benchmark suites used for testing will most likely already be on your system, as essentially all of this software is available online. As such, it allows direct correlation between reader and reviewer due to the ease of accessibility, and hence results can simply be compared between different test systems and configurations.

Real-world benchmarks included a batch of files and folders with capacities of 250MB, 500MB, and 1000MB respectively to test file transfer performance. Windows 7 boot times were also monitored and timed starting from the OS load screen to Steam’s login window (the last program to load).

For consistency, each test was run three times for the DRAM cache to kick in, utilizing AHCI as the storage mode. The average of all three was taken as the final result. Note that once installed, the total size shows up as roughly 447GB.

CRYSTALDISKINFO X64 VER. 5.5.1

CrystalDiskInfo allows monitoring the health of all the physical hard disks, may they be internal, or external. Using their own built-in SMART tools plus any temperature-monitoring tools that may be present in the computer or hard drive, CDI gives accurate health readings of your drives and gives warnings in case of imminent drive malfunction.

Everything seems to be running well, including TRIM on the Crucial M500 480GB. Enclosure temperature seems to be in-line with the projected temperature as well, and 20 degrees Celsius is quite chilly!