Crucial M500 brings SSD pricing to a new low
Crucial announces that its new M500 solid-state drive offers up to 960GB for less than $600.
The dream of a solid-state drive that offers near 1TB of storage space without breaking the bank has just come true.
Crucial today announced the availability of the M500 SSD, its first terabyte-class drive, which comes in 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB capacities and costs $129.99, $219.99, $399.99, and $599.99, respectively.
This is the first SSD on the market to offer close to 1TB at a cost close to that of most existing 480GB to 512GB SSDs.
According to Crucial, the M500 uses Micron's 20nm MLC NAND flash and Micron's custom firmware to deliver up to 80,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). The company claims the drive's sequential read and write speeds reach up to 500MBps and 400MBps, respectively.
The Crucial M500 SSD supports AES 256 hardware-based encryption and thermal management technology. The drive draws less than 5 milliwatts of power while the host system is in sleep mode, an improvement of 93 percent compared with previous drives from Crucial, such as the
Like most new SSDs, the Crucial M500 supports the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard and is of a standard 2.5-inch design with 7mm thickness. This means it can fit in all standard laptops and desktops as well as some ultrabooks. Apart from the 960GB version, the rest of the drive's capacities will also be available in the M.2 and mSATA form factors in the second part of this year.
Crucials says the new drive offers a life expectancy of 1.2 million hours mean time to failure (MTTF), and a write-endurance of 72BT total bytes written. This means the drive is guaranteed to last five years if you write 40GB to it per day and every day.
The Crucial M500 drive is available now and comes with a three-year warranty. Check back soon for a full review of it.