Crucial M550 Review: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB Models Tested
by Kristian Vättö on March 18, 2014 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2011
Back in 2011 (which seems like so long ago now!), we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on peak IO performance and basic garbage collection routines. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. Our thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives.
We tried to cover as many bases as possible with the software incorporated into this test. There's a lot of photo editing in Photoshop, HTML editing in Dreamweaver, web browsing, game playing/level loading (Starcraft II & WoW are both a part of the test) as well as general use stuff (application installing, virus scanning). We've included a large amount of email downloading, document creation and editing as well. To top it all off we even use Visual Studio 2008 to build Chromium during the test. The test has 2,168,893 read operations and 1,783,447 write operations. The IO breakdown is as follows:
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload IO Breakdown | |
| IO Size | % of Total |
| 4KB | 28% |
| 16KB | 10% |
| 32KB | 10% |
| 64KB | 4% |
Only 42% of all operations are sequential, the rest range from pseudo to fully random (with most falling in the pseudo-random category). Average queue depth is 4.625 IOs, with 59% of operations taking place in an IO queue of 1. The full description of the test can be found here.
AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload
AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload
Our light workload actually has more write operations than read operations. The split is as follows: 372,630 reads and 459,709 writes. The relatively close read/write ratio does better mimic a typical light workload (although even lighter workloads would be far more read centric). There's lots of web browsing, photo editing (but with a greater focus on photo consumption), video playback as well as some application installs and gaming. The I/O breakdown is similar to the heavy workload at small IOs, however you'll notice that there are far fewer large IO transfers.
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload IO Breakdown | |
| IO Size | % of Total |
| 4KB | 27% |
| 16KB | 8% |
| 32KB | 6% |
| 64KB | 5% |
Even with our older (generally less demanding) workloads, the M550—like the M500—don't really stack up all that well compared to the top performers. Provided the pricing is right, we can overlook a lot of this, but if you're after top performance there are definitely better SSDs.
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tech6 - Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - link
I don't think that the M550 is so much a "performance" variant as it is a direct replacement for the 500. Most likely what is happening here is that the benchmark for value SSDs has just been lifted slightly. Once the M500 disappears the 550 will assume its price point.Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - link
The thing is, the M550 doesn't replace the M500. The M500 will continue to be available and the M550 is simply Crucial's "high-end" offering.ZeDestructor - Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - link
Interesting... Much like tech6, I was expecting the M500 to die off peacefully... Any details from micron on why they're doing that?For now, I should go and buy an M500 480GB already... They're really cheap...
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - link
There are still some cost savings from the 128Gbit NAND at the smaller capacities and it's possible that the controller/DRAM configurations are slightly cheaper as well. Could be that Crucial/Micron is also using slightly lower quality NAND for the M500 since the extra space reserved for RAIN makes sure that is not an issue.hojnikb - Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - link
Its interesting, that they are not using more dies per package (as opposed to samsung with evos).I'm guessing using less packages and possibly smaller pcb could yield additional cost savings for crucial/micron... Or is this not the case...? Also they could go with dramless like toshiba is doing with their q series ?
V500 anyone ?
hojnikb - Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - link
So basicly m500 is crucials/microns "low" end offering now.Just like the crappy v4 (that drive is really slow and im ashamed to own one) that was in the m4 days.
tim851 - Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - link
I hope so. I find the speed of SSDs to be sufficient for now and I'd like to see them work on pricing rather than performance.hojnikb - Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - link
Yeah i hope so too. I'm planning to buy 480GB/1TB version sometime this year to replace that sandforce joke i'm having now (intel's 330) and ditch HDDs alltogether.StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
I'm running a several year old OCZ Vertex 2 64Gb SSD... Been solid.One thing I have never said however was: "Gee this SSD is slow!". - Mostly the main advantage SSD's brought to the arena was the stupidly low latencies compared to mechanical drives.
Price needs to still come down, capacities need to keep increasing in the low-end and mid-range segments.
Literally the single *biggest* upgrade that a majority of PC's could use is simply an SSD, regardless of it's transfer rates.
Even on ancient 6-7 year old Core 2 PC's...
trichome333 - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
I agree mate. Just got a M500 240gb and I literally feel like a dunce for not moving earlier.