The Crucial M500 solid-state drive may be at the bottom of our lineup, but it can still hold its own. This SSD is quick and efficient and will do the job in just about any machine. A Marvell controller drives this device along with MLC flash-component technology and SATA 3 compatibility.

The Crucial M500 solid-state drive is fast; and Crucial has fantastic help and support options

This is a 2.5-inch form factor SSD that does not come with a 3.5-inch mounting kit

Today we have in our labs the latest SSD offering by Crucial, the Crucial M500 series. Announced earlier this year at CES, it is the world's first SSD series to use Micron's new 128Gbit MLC NAND die.

The SSDs that comprise Crucial's new M500 range come in a variety of capacities, from a relatively low 128GB to a large 960GB, but each SSD uses the SATA3 interface, a Marvell 88SS9187 controller and 20nm Micron MLC NAND flash chips.

Crucial's new M500 SSD is built on an upgraded Marvell flash controller with new 20 nanometer 128 Gbit die MLC flash. This combination makes for a very affordable drive that also provides excellent performance in both synthetic and real-life performance testing.

Great pricing; 7.5 mm thin-Ultrabook compatible; Adapter for 9.5 mm drives included; Supports TRIM; 3-year warranty

Can't find anything wrong

Behind Crucial stands Micron Technology, one of the world's largest semiconductor makers, which may go some way to explain the great value that Crucial SSD s have offered to date. See all Storage reviews .

The speed of this drive is amazing regardless of the type of file you are working with. It is an easy to set up high quality drive. We did a massive amount of research about SSD drives before purchasing and Crucial drives are the very best. They don't disappoint.

Upgrade for my 2008 MacBook Pro which had mechanical hdd. Very happy with the performance gain. I've read quite a bit about these drives and the 120GB and 240GB are said to have poor write speeds compared to peers. I don't need great writes for my Mac so price was my driver.

But even the blue-hued chip giant must have been somewhat surprised by just how cutthroat this SSD marketplace has become. While SSDs may never quite reach parity with HDDs when it comes to price per gigabyte, they have become sufficiently less expensive to make the combination of a small SDD (for...

The M500 Series from Crucial won't win any extreme performance awards but it's certainly fast enough for virtually anyone and the price per usable GB of the 480Gb and 960GB drives is extremely attractive.

This is my first SSD. I had been waiting for one affordable yet big enough that daily operations wasn't extremely painful due to small size. I get FAR more iops in every size range than my four disk sata or SAS10k raid00 arrays.