Cheap Crucial M500 960GB announced

Always wanted to replace your HDD with a SSD, you had the money, but 512GB was the biggest you could find? Or perhaps you thought the SSDs cost too much?

Look no further. Crucial have announced their M500 which have capacity from 120GB all the way up to 1024GB. All except the 1024GB come on mSATA and normal form. 1024GB is available on the standard 2.5" version.
The price? Well I can`t tell you exact price for each version, but Crucial promise that their 1024GB will cost below $600 :thumbsup:



AnandTech - Micron/Crucial Announces M500 SSD Line of SSDs

New Micron and Crucial M500 SSDs Offer Affordable, High-Capacity Storage (NASDAQ:MU)

 

Yeah, I am excited about this announcement - I can feel the heat this is putting on Intel to get something (anything) similar out there soon.

Just looking at the charts above - the new 'sweet spot' will be the 480GB and 960GB capacities for maximum performance (assuming the controller can effectively handle the 960GB's of nand just as well as it can handle the 480GB version).

If the reliability and consistency is like the 256GB and 512GB M4 - we have a new winner - especially at the suggested/expected prices!



Thanks for starting the thread Cloudfire - I am expecting you to post the first hands on reviews you can find here.

 

Will post reviews for sure. The HDD owners just lost one of their arguments why they won`t buy SSD. Now the price is what stops most of us but $0.5-0.6/GB isn`t a bad start. In fact its amazing price

Yup gonna be interesting to see if the controller can handle the large amount of NAND as in the lower capacity models. Its a huge area it have to patrol for used blocks to clear, but then again, you can have a pretty good over provisioning area to cover any issue in that department

 

at $0.50 per GB, I'm in!

 

Well, 50-60¢ per GB is nice, it's still too pricey for me, especially when it's a storage drive.

 

That's what you have to weigh, obviously. If you need a 1TB drive primarily for storing stuff, get a $100 1TB hard drive. Although this is great for laptops with a single drive bay. Will be great by next Christmas to get a 1TB SSD for $300.

In any case, Tiller will likely partition free space so he has a 200GB usable drive anyhow.

 

Smart money is 385.6GB... on the 960GB drive. :thumbsup:

 

Naw, I've already done the calculation:

960GB x 1,000,000,000=960,000,000,000 bytes nominal

divided by 1024, and 1024 and 1024 = ~894GB available

multiply by 0.3 = ~268GB that I can thrash to my hearts content!

This wouldn't be my O/S + Program drive - no, this will be one of my PS Scratch Disk's (out of 4) on my desktops.


For an O/S + Program drive on a notebook - using this at 50% capacity (~447GB) is still giving me almost three times the capacity (447/150) with 50% vs. 30% over-provisioning than what an Intel 520 240GB or an M4 256GB SSD is able to now and with much faster performance (because of the incompressible 'hit' on the SF based Intel and the lower performance of the M4).


Okay, you were both close, but I won!!!

(Are these available yet - so we can all win)...

 

But tiller are you factoring in the 14.5 % Spare area? Anyone know if they need any Beta testers?

 

As we both know, SSD drives compete based on their better latency, and are still nowhere close to being competitive as storage drives.

 

No, I always ignore the manufacturers built-in OP'ing as that is needed to simply meet the spec's they're marketing with.

 

The smaller capacities are listed as in production: Client SSD - Micron Technology, Inc.

We should be seeing these drives soon .

 

Don't see this being great for a storage drive, but great for video editing, video gamers and other things of that nature that can take advantage of the SSD's speeds but used too much capacity to make it practical.

 

Crucial is really cutting their prices on their mSata drives. The 256gb model is at .625gb/dollar ( Amazon link), which is awesome.

 

would be nice while working on virtual machines... just hope Intel and Samsung releases theirs soon as well so we can see some price competitions lol

Sent from my EndeavorU using Tapatalk 2

 

$160. Thanks for the link. Big wow on that. Best I'd previously seen was $190+

Be interesting to see if it's the new price, or if it's a one or two day sale.

 

I reckon the day I need to change my SSDs, it will probably become pretty affordable )

 

I went to that link just ow and it says it's $202

 

Sale's over...

 

He posted today, so i figured it would still be applicable.

 

Newegg also had the Crucial 256GB m4 mSATA at $160 but now says sold out.

When the M500 mSATA series is on the shelves it will include a 120GB that is now in production plus a 240GB and 480GB model that are now sampling.This sizes are because of the 7% over provisioning on the M500 series.

 

That was a short sale. I purchased it for $160 right as I was posting that.

 

Crucial M4 has been great for almost 2 years, really an amazing drive. The M500 480gb will be on my short list for my Haswell desktop build for sure... and in time probably M500 mSatas for the GT70. M500 and Samsung 840pro seems like two of the best ssds for 2013, i really hope intel will go back into developing their own controller and i would be back to intel... but if they remain on sanforce ill continue to look elsewhere.

 

To each his own.

I'm looking forward to the possibility of a 960GB M500 but have mostly been very happy with what I have previously purchased.

I've got a Vertex 2(34nm) that has over 6200 hours and 2100 starts that keeps on ticking in almost 3 years of daily use.

A Vertex 3 MI hasn't missed a beat.

Two SandDisk Extremes have been a pleasure to use.

A recently purchased OCZ Vector is proving itself everyday.

I had bad luck with GSKill Falcon,Intel M2 and a Crucial C300.

 

I assume that all SSDs will die at some stage, I mostly pick drives based on performance and ease of RMA.

 

Crucial and Samsung, and Intel for that matter, have a solid reputation for performance, reliability, and customer service. It's really OCZ's horrible CS and way they handled the whole throttling issue that left a bad taste in people's mouth. And Sandforce's durawrite really put a damper on their highly touted low WA. It's like limiting the speed of your car to 45mph if your MPG goes below a certain threshold.

 

Sandforce is the one controller I will not entertain. So much about it is really good in Theory but somehow, there always seems to be a flaw in implementation. Granted, Intel's adoption was the best thing that could've happened as it really ironed out the reliability but I believe a lot of the issues is because LSI is fabless and the Sandforce controller is implemented without the manufacturing teams having access to the source code of the firmware to optimize for their particular NAND setup. I agree that using Durawrite to compensate for poor NAND is a huge mistake, customers don't appreciate buying a level of performance and finding another.
When I was deciding between the OCZ vector or Samsung 840pro, I thought to myself, it would cost me only $10 to send my drive to the Samsung Sydney service centre for RMA vs probably about $30 for OCZ. Plus when I had an issue registering the drive for 3 months extra warranty, Samsung's customer support took me 5 minutes to contact and they corrected the issue in less than 10 minutes as it turned out to be an error with their registration system, they even thanked me for pointing out the issue to them.
In all fairness, I think my Intel 320 (my first SSD) will probably outlast all the others I have despite being the slowest, you can clearly see the reliability oriented engineering that went in to the drive and the little touches like 7mm compatibility is a real bonus.

 

Doesn't the Intel 320 SSD have a Sandforce controller?

Service by the maker of the SSD is a very good point, and something that I'd not have paid too much attention to as recently as just a few months ago.

Doesn't the Intel 320 SSD have a Sandforce controller?

Anyway and FWIW and in keeping with the topic of this thread, the 480GB Crucial M500 mSATA SSD is the one thing on my short list, when it gets released, and it'll go into my X220 laptop.

When I get one, I'll clone my existing boot 256GB M4 mSATA (on the X220) to the new 480GB M500 mSATA (likely a 2 step process with a HDD in the middle), and then reformat the M4 (remove "boot" and re-size partitions) then move the M4 to my T530 laptop, to replace the 120GB Intel 320 SDD that I have in there now as the 2nd SSD. Doing that does 3 things: 1) increases my total drive space by ~130GB and 2) reduces the already too heavy weight of my T530 by a bit more than 5 ounces and 3) leaves the DVD bay open and more ready to take a temp caddy with HDD (for backup) or DVD (although I have a decent compact Samsung USB DVD which is my 1st choice when needing a DVD unit in order to minimize wear on the DVD bay connectors).

 

No, Intel uses their own (3rd gen) controller in the 320 Series. Probably the most power efficient SSD I've used (but certainly not the fastest, of course).


See:
AnandTech | The Intel SSD 320 Review: 25nm G3 is Finally Here

 

Nice link, thanks!

Interesting "Random Write Performance" on the 1st web page; the better performance makes me wish I'd bought the Intel 160GB 320 unit, and not the 120GB unit that I did buy, as that small extra increase in size makes it MUCH more useable in the near future.

 

Yeah; with SSD's; size matters.

And bigger (than 240/256GB) is not always better.

 

Does anyone know of an ETA for the new M500's? I'm waiting on the 256GB/240GB mSATA.

 

They're expected to be released during the second quarter of 2013. In other words: April, May or June.

 

This is the only place I've seen them.Preorder?

Crucial M500 mSATA SSD - SSDcenter.be

Crucial M500 - SSDcenter.be

 

From Google:

389.81 US Dollar = 480 GB mSATA
689.55 US Dollar = 960 GB 2.5"

I'm thinking when released in the US they'll be more like $400 and $700? Or less?

 

That's a guess that I can agree with.

If the new M500 units get good reviews (as tiller expects/hopes), it'll be a few months until Crucial ramps up production to meet demand.

At which point I expect to see pricing under $300 and $600 respectively.

 

I'm getting antsy waiting for this m500 ssd(s), how much longer must i wait! I'm getting both msata and 2.5" right off the bat, should be plenty for all my data and programs/os plus over provisioning for more consistent performance.

It would suck if it didn't fit in my lappy.

 

No need to OP.

 

Why not? Isn't that the general consensus?

 

LOL!

FWIW the 480GB M500 mSATA is on my short list.

I keep checking AnandTech | SSDs but so far no new info.

Nice pic!

I expect the M500 mSATA to be same size as the M4 mSATA w/ no funny extra thickness type of stuff.

 

other than the bigger size and barely faster speed, is there any other significant improvements? I'm trying to justify my future purchase here

 

Don't know if you guys seen this video yet, but i thought it was pretty cool to see:




From what I understand, the M500 will be great for mobile devices (longer battery life). Sorry if this was already posted, its just to hold me over for a few more weeks.

 

Great video! I am surprised at the level of quality & quality control from Crucial for the price of their product.

 

I think that's pretty common in the industry.

 

Yeah, I wouldn't expect anything less from a company like Samsung, I only mentioned that because of the price. Their SSD's are cheaper than all others and seem to be of equal of greater quality -- that was my point. :thumbsup:

 

Quality = reduced cost.

 

We have the M500 on preorder all over Norway. The 960GB cost $800, which is not too bad considering that this is european price

 

@Cloudfire: Has your vendor provided an estimated ship date???

@long905: the one "significant improvement" that seems to keep getting overlooked in this thread is that Crucial/Micron, with their soon to be released 20nm MLC NAND SSD devices, are about to start us on the next cycle of lower priced SSD devices.

In particular Crucial has been very aggressive with their target M500 pricing of 480GB < $300, and 960GB < $600.

AFAIK so far what little 20nm MLC NAND that has shown up for sale still hasn't made much change to SSD pricing. I expect that to change in the next few months when the M500 SSD devices are out.

 

There are two dates floating around here in Norway: 03.26.13 and 04.11.13

 

I specifically purchased the lower 240/256 versions last month in anticipation of the upgrade later this year. My justification is work/study.

My primary SSD is already filled and I could use the extra space on the mSATA for my scratch disc. The rest is as you say.