Description

Crucial BX500 3D NAND

Crucial’s BX500 is a cheap option that will outperform any HDD as a boot drive, but it comes with drawbacks. The BX500’s low endurance and application performance rank far behind most current-gen SSDs in the market. Pricing is competitive, but there are much better options available for just a few dollars more, including Crucial’s own MX500, making this drive hard to recommend.

Crucial BX500 3D NAND

Made for price-conscious buyers who need 2.5-inch SATA drives, Crucial BX500 performs competently, but doesn’t even come close to being one of the. With so many superior products in the same price range, it’s hard to recommend.

Crucial’s BX500 is the successor to its popular BX300 line of SSDs. Like the company’s mainstream MX500 brand, the BX500 skips over the 400-naming scheme. But, unlike the MX500, the BX500 doesn’t offer much of an upgrade path over its predecessor

the BX series is a streamlined, no-frills SSD with fewer accessories and features than the MX series. Crucial launched the BX series to tempt buyers into purchasing flash when other options in the market were too expensive. The original BX100 came with a 16nm planar (2D) MLC flash and a Silicon Motion (SMI) controller. That was Crucial’s first SSD with an SMI controller, and that trend continues with the BX500. The SSD uses the new SM2258XT four-channel SSD controller paired with Micron’s latest 64-Layer 3D TLC flash.

The base SM2258 is a good SATA SSD controller, and it offers impressive performance and reliability if it’s paired with the right flash. But it needs an expensive DRAM package for caching.

The SM2258XT, known as the XT model, combats this by removing the need for DRAM. This allows the SSD to store the critical flash translation layer directly on the flash instead of in a DRAM buffer. This lowers prices by a few dollars, but it also results in lower performance. NAND isn’t as fast as DRAM, and the constant read/write modifications to the flash translation layer are a strenuous task. As a result, performance can be rather unflattering–even falling into hard drive territory.