The Crucial M500 is the company's third-generation 6Gb/s SSD, and the successor to the often-praised M4 SSD, which we named the "Best Bang for your Buck" SSD back last year due to its well-rounded package of decent performance at a great price.

Fastest drive in its class by a hair; great value

Bare-bones bundle; 3-year warranty

Over a year ago at CES 2013, Crucial teased us with the promise of a "Terabyte-Class" SSD that was coming later that year. They were of course talking about the M500 series - and more specifically the 960GB version.

Exceeds rated read and write speeds; 7mm low profile fits in many Ultrabooks and thinner laptops; Excellent compatibility; Decent 3 year warranty; Massive storage (for an SSD; Very affordable for a terabyte-class SSD

No desktop drive bracket included; No software bundle included in the box for migration

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

Crucial M500 Solid State Drive Review Micron Technology updates their product family with the new Crucial M500 solid state drive, which arrives in capacities ranging from 120GB-960GB for 2.5" SATA, mSATA, and M.2/NGFF form factors.

Very fast 539/445 MBps read/write speed with ATTO; TCG Opal 2.0 security with 256-bit AES hardware encryption; Marvell 88SS9187 controller supports TRIM; NCQ; and Windows 8 drive telemetry; 3-Year Micron Technology product warranty support; 120/240/480/960GB high-speed SSD storage capacities; Device...

Some manufacturers offer five-year warranty; High-end performance only available from 480/960GB versions; Expensive enthusiast-level product

Evolution continues  for Crucial and their SSD products. The Crucial M500 is the SSD that is replacing the trusty old M4 SSD. As we can expect the M500 not only does everything that that the M4 did, it does much better, and adds more functions to improve not only the SSD but also the overall...

Outstanding operation as a system drive; Is able to achieve 80.000 IOPS without sweating; SATA 6Gbps support; 7mm thick SSD ready for Ultrabooks; Hardware data encryption; Very fast recovery from a used state; Adaptive thermal protection; 3 year warranty; Very well priced

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As much as we want the unbelievable performance that we see in PCIe M.2 SSDs, the name of the game today is capacity and the number of e-mails received from people looking for higher capacity SSDs is amazing.

We've waded through a lot of performance data, and we'll indulge a couple more graphs before weighing in with our final verdict. The following scatter plots use an overall performance score derived by comparing how each drive stacks up against a common baseline.

Prior to the m4, Crucial updated their flagship SSD products roughly every year, but that changed when m4 stretched the timeline. The m4 product series held a two-year stretch on the timeline and is still a popular product today, while the existing supply dwindles away.

The big news surrounding the Crucial M500 during CES this year was the shockingly low price per GB. The price of a 960GB for $599 brings the price per GB down to 63 cents. This is the lowest price on the market, and with Crucial's solid reputation in the SSD space it makes for a safe bet.

Crucial's M500 offers the lowest price per gigabyte for an MLC SSD with enterprise-class features not seen on typical consumer SSD data drives. With new 128Gbit MLC NAND paired with the Marvell 9187 controller the M500 should deliver great performance at a historically low price point.