Crucial M550 SSD (512GB) Review – Consistent Performance Never Looked So Good!

Our report today examines Crucial’s latest SATA 3 SSD release, the M550 2.5″ 512GB SSD. The M550 is directed towards the personal computing market and is advertised with increased performance, expanded battery life for mobile users, a more fluid set of form factors and the standard high capacities.

The Crucial M550 2.5″ SSD features the SATA III (6Gbps) interface as well as Native Write Acceleration that is a significant step up on the M500 family. Additionally, the M550 is also has lower power consumption than its predecessor, the M500, with a low draw of <3mW while the device is in a sleep state, and 150mW during active use. The lower power consumption will be more beneficial to mobile users, as this will help enhance the battery life of their mobile device. The drive also features Adaptive Thermal Protection, which maintains the temperature of the drive at an optimal level, and will adjust the NAND activity based upon usage.

When it comes to the protection of the drives data, one can never be too safe. Crucial has included a Data Integrity Algorithm within the drive to add four layers of defence in regards to the corruption of data, of course on a hardware level and not software. The Crucial M550 also meets the latest in the encryption standards for TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 encryption, as well as featuring AES 256-bit hardware encryption

CRUCIAL M550 SPECIFICATIONS

The packaging for the Crucial M550 is quite simple, as it features a picture of the drive on the front of the packaging, and on the back there is a description of the contents.

In the packaging, you will find the drive itself, as well as a 7mm to 9.5mm spacer.

As you can see from the image below, the Crucial M550 will be available in three different for factors, 2.5″, mSATA and M.2. The 2.5″ form factor will have capacities available in 128, 256, 512GB and 1TB. Additionally, we can see that performance is consistent across the board for drives with capacities of 512GB and higher. The Crucial M550 2.5″ 512GB SSD has been listed to feature sequential read speeds of up to 550MB/s, as well as write speeds up of to 500MB/s. The Crucial M550’s with 128GB of storage capacity feature similar read speeds, but write speeds of only 350MB/s.

Check Out the M550 SSD 1TB capacity review at The SSD Review!

The Crucial M550 SSD becomes available for purchase at the time of this report and the MSRP is expected to be 15 to 20% premium over the Crucial M500 SSD series.