Remember Crucial’s M500 SSD? The successor to the two-year-old m4 was announced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, and now, the drive has finally made its way online. True to Crucial’s promise, you can get a 960GB version for under $600.
Amazon seems to have the lowest prices right now, with the 960GB model selling for $570. That works out to 59 cents per gig, which is unheard of for an SSD boasting almost a terabyte of storage. 960GB SSDs typically cost a grand and up.
Expect to pay more per gigabyte for the lower-capacity M500 variants, though. The 480, 240, and 120GB models are selling for $363, $202, and $129, respectively—$0.76, $0.84, and $1.08 per gig.
Like its m4 predecessor, the M500 uses Marvell controller silicon. This time, it’s the Marvell 88SS9177, which is paired with custom firmware and Micron’s own 20-nm MLC NAND. The M500 also sports hardware-based encryption, improved thermal management, and power-loss protection. It has a more efficient sleep mode, as well; Crucial claims the M500’s slumber state consumes 93% less power than that of the old m4.
The Crucial M500 is purportedly capable of hitting 500MB/s with sequential reads and 400MB/s with writes, although those figures apply only to the 480 and 960GB models. The 240 and 120GB versions have sequential write rates of 250 and 130MB/s, respectively, putting them in the same league as Samsung’s budget 840 Series drive. We’re working on putting together a Crucial M500 review and hope to have some numbers comparing the SSD to the 840 Series and its other rivals soon. Stay tuned.