Crucial M500 120GB SSD Review

Introduction

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.

Announced in January at CES, the Crucial M500 is the successor to the m4 series and we expect it to have a long run as well. We finally have all of the crucial pieces together to take a complete look at the new M500 series in all available 2.5" capacity sizes.

The Crucial M500 is the company's first consumer SSD to use new 20nm flash from parent company Micron. Paired with the new flash is a Marvell 88SS9187 controller and Micron DRAM. Over the last few weeks, we've been critical about the new 20nm IMFT flash. Many companies are having a difficult time securing their own and Crucial seems to have issues supplying the 960GB M500 drive to the channel.

The new 20nm flash seems to have issues when used in smaller capacity SSDs. This isn't anything new, 25nm flash didn't work out too well for 64GB class SSDs, but the new 20nm flash has pushed the curve up into the 128GB class.

Today we're looking at how the new 20nm flash works in Micron / Crucial's own 128GB class product.