Crucial BX500 SSD review

Table of Contents

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Crucial BX500 SSD

The Crucial BX500 SSD is a great choice for anyone looking for an affordable solid-state drive (SSD). It offers high performance, reliability, and affordability all in one package.

The Crucial BX500 SSD comes in a variety of capacities to fit your needs. It supports both SATA and PCI Express 3.0 x4 interface, so you can choose the best fit for your system.

The Crucial BX500 SSD offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 530MB/s and 520MB/s, respectively. It also has a 5-year limited warranty.

The Crucial BX500 SSD is a great choice for anyone looking for an affordable, reliable, and high-performance SSD.

Design and price

Currently available on Amazon, the BX500 SSD is a 2.5-inch SATA 6Gbps SSD that is 7 millimeters thick, super lightweight, and super fast. The 240GB SSD we reviewed comes in four sizes: two TB capacity we tested (currently $200 on Amazon), one terabyte ($90 on Amazon), 480GB ($55 on Amazon) , and two two terabytes ($35.99 on Amazon). You’re going to be surprised by how affordable that is, and also that the capacity mix is quite interesting.

You’ll usually find 250GB and 500GB drives in product lines with 1TB and 2TB models, or 980GB and 1920GB drives with 240GB and 480GB capacities. In this case, Crucial seems to think that the BX500s need more, which may have something to do with intelligent caching, since there is a higher percentage of NAND used for overprovisioning (allocating spare cells as replacements).

Silicon Motion SM2259XT controller

We tested the BX500 with four NAND chips bearing the OBY22NX894 marking and a Silicon Motion SM2259XT controller. The small PC board inside the unit contained four NAND chips, which I did not see anywhere online. In our long 450GB write test, the performance dropped significantly after we ran out of secondary cache, suggesting that it’s a quad-level cell/4-bit (16 voltage levels) memory.

As you can see from the pictures, not all NAND chips are the same density and they all support the same 540MBps reading and 500MBps writing speeds. Therefore, the NAND and controller will probably be the same in the lower capacities. However, Crucial does not guarantee that this product will continue to use the same components for its entire life cycle—which means your drive may not perform as well as the drive we reviewed.

There is no RAM on board, and the NAND on the drive is used for SLC cache, so no DRAM is present to assist in data recovery and write speed estimation. As a result, when the drive runs out of cache, as mentioned, write performance will drop significantly.

There is very little chance that you will experience a write slowdown with Crucial’s BX500 drive for older laptops. It provides a great upgrade to capacity for older laptops.

Performance

Even with the larger capacities, the 2TB BX500 is very reliable as far as everyday performances are concerned. You might experience write slowdowns on the 240GB and 480GB drives, as they have less NAND to use as cache.

When the NAND cache is gone, all SSDs slow down, with QLC being the slowest. As drives fill up and the NAND is no longer available for cache, the phenomenon will appear more frequently in all drives. That is why most SSDs should be overpurchased in terms of capacity.

Modest performance difference

During normal operation, you wouldn’t notice the BX500’s modest performance difference. According to CrystalDiskMark 6, the BX500 has a little slower performance than its competition, but only just barely.

A 48GB file transfer on the BX500 actually outperformed the competition (Samsung 860 QVO, Samsung 870 QVO, Kingston KC600) in terms of performance. It’s more of an indication of how long writing might be occasionally experienced by users during backups or other heavy operations. However, remember that these times were posted by the 2TB drive, so the 240GB and 480GB BX500s will likely experience slower write times than the times shown below if they hit the QLC write slowdown earlier and have a slower write rate.

Read

As far as normal-to-large transfer operations are concerned, the BX500 performs well. These real-world transfers were much faster than all of the drives it was compared to, and it was the best drive in this category. This 450GB write time shows just how much the BX500 and other QLC drives slow down when they run out of cache. One of the biggest differences between the 450GB drive and the other TLC drive in the charts is the Kingston KC600. If in fact it is employing a cache, it does not slow down off-cache.

Secondary cache

It’s true that the BX500 isn’t as tragic when it runs out of secondary cache as Samsung’s older 860 QLC, but it still slows down greatly when that cache runs out. This isn’t an SSD you want for quickly writing a lot of data.

The screen capture shown below illustrates how the BX500 can suffer from a write speed drop of 40MBps when it runs out of cache. If it is caught doing housekeeping, the write speed drops to 10MBps. However, it doesn’t flatline there. The speed fluctuates between 40MBps and full speed, implying that more cache is being allocated as soon as possible.

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40MBps

Assuming the 1TB drive runs out of cache at 70GB written, the 480GB drive at around 35GB, and the 240GB drive at around 15-20GB, all things being equal, the 2TB drive would probably run out of cache at 140GB written.

The BX500 can experience a 40MBps decrease in write performance when running out of cache.

It’s necessary to mention the slow off-cache write speed once again, but this occurs only when large amounts of data are written-or, as I mentioned, when the drive’s capacity is near its limit.

Good for everyday use

Its subjective performance is comparable to anything out there, except for when it runs out of cache. The average user won’t encounter that rare occurrence. Power users should skip it, but it’s a great deal for everyone else. Our recommendation is to overbuy capacity by at least 50%.

Testing Says: The Speed’s on Par for SATA

During our benchmark testing, we found that the BX500 performed as well as you’d expect for a 2.5-inch drive with a SATA connection. A first step in PCMark 8 is to run its Storage test, which simulates how much your hard drive will be used for everyday tasks like editing photos and browsing the web. That score is right on par with most other SATA drives in this class.

…as well as its Sequential Q32T1 read and write speeds of 562MBps and 530MBps, respectively…

It simulates best-case, straight-line transfers of large files, while it simulates the normal loading of programs or games or bootup sequences with the 4K (or random read/write) tests. In Crystal DiskMark 4K, the drive is in line with competitive drives, such as the Kingston Fury RGB ($186.99 at Amazon) and Samsung SSD 860 QVO ($186.99).

Following that, we ran a series of file and folder transfers through the AS-SSD benchmarking utility, copying large files and folders from one location to another on the test drive. This is a bit of a surprise in the transfer-test results, as both the BX500 and the Crucial MX500 were able to transfer large ISOs, program folders, and game folders…

Does not outperform

Despite the fact that the BX500 does not outperform other SSDs tested by PC Labs, such as the Samsung SSD 860 QVO in both the program folder and game folder tests, it does manage to win the ISO test despite a slight difference in the price per gigabyte between the QVO and BX500 (12.7 cents per gigabyte on the QVO versus 12.4 cents on the BX500).

It is believed that the self-encrypting drive (SED) feature embedded in the MX500 may have contributed to the nearly 22 percent increase in transfers in the game folder test between the BX500 and MX500. However, even in this case, the overhead of encrypting/decrypting would be barely noticeable, or not noticeable under almost all realistic conditions.

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So, How Much Can You Write?

TBW is another significant difference between the MX500 and the BX500 that makes it an attractive option. A drive’s memory cells are determined by how long they will last under a certain amount of write activity before they start to fail and are “decommissioned” by the drive software. Although the 500GB MX500 has a 5-year write rating of 98GB per day, the 480GB version is rated at 65GB for five years. At other capacities, the ratings scale similarly.

In your average user, there is very little chance of ever being able to handle these kinds of data-transfer volumes on a daily basis. If you don’t actually, consistently, write tens of gigabytes of data to your SSD every day, this figure shouldn’t play a role in your decision-making process because it just gives you a frame of reference for how “durable” the memory cells are on a drive. (You care about this if you work a lot with large videos.)

A five-year warranty is included with the MX500, but only a three-year warranty is included with the BX500. The warranty length is linked to endurance rating, so Crucial itself ranks the BX500 lower than the MX500. That’s not a major dealbreaker in our book, but it’s worth mentioning for the same reasons.

A Mid-Price SSD With Modest Improvements

However, the market seems to have a slightly different opinion on the BX500 ($74.31 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window), despite Crucial pushing it as its value option. Compared to the 500GB MX500, the BX500 offers too few advantages at its 480GB test capacity, given pricing at the time of this review. You’d be better off paying the (literal) extra few bucks to spring for the MX500 instead of the BX500, since it packs fewer features, the price-to-gigabyte ratio is almost identical, and it has a shorter warranty—unless the price changes from day to day, which it can.

PROS

An SATA drive that is value-minded performs well in testing.
The capacity can be selected from four options.
Dashboard that covers all aspects of driving.

CONS

Compared to five-year warranties, three-year warranties are available.
Compared to competing Crucial drives, this drive has a lower “total writes” rating.
Features are few and far between.

Final thoughts on Crucial BX500 SSD Review

A lot of write activity on the BX500 will cause it to perform poorly, but read activity will perform fine and in our tests was able to reach the intended 550 MB/s speed. With intermittent dropouts during writes and steady read performance throughout, ATTO demonstrated how one-sided this drive’s performance can be.

Despite the fact that it is the cheapest 2TB SATA SSD on the market at $199.99, the market has driven down the cost of all SATA drives, regardless of performance. A BX500 is a useful data drive for scenarios where heavy write loads aren’t required, such as a game drive or console drive replacement, as it is within $20 of the higher-performing drives like the MX500, WD Blue, and Seagate Barracuda.