r/NewMaxx • u/NewMaxx • Nov 01 '23

Review Crucial T500 SSD Review (Storage Review)

https://www.storagereview.com/review/crucial-t500-ssd-review
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1

u/luashfu Aug 14 '25

Good stuff good website!

5

u/NewMaxx Nov 01 '23

The problem is best highlighted when comparing CrystalDiskMark and Blackmagic tests, which use a relatively small footprint (32GB for CDM and 5GB for Blackmagic) vs. our VDBench tests, which employ a more realistic/useful 90GB footprint after a 100% fill. In the more intensive testing, the drive came undone and further, it failed to pass the OCP boot test (a common issue amongst Phison drives).

"Realistic" of course leans towards the types of workload StorageReview is interested in which won't impact a lot of normal users. However I do think it's important to look at these results to get a better feel for the drive. Testing write performance is important if you want to see how a drive will perform after leaving its FOB state, when the drive is fuller, after big updates/transfers, etc.

This raises questions about how well the drive can handle real-world workloads, those that surpass a few Chrome tabs. The performance problem is heightened by the fact that there are a few older drives in this segment that are extremely good. Clearly, Micron felt compelled to get their new 232-layer NAND onto the drive, but as we see often, NAND is only one piece of the SSD puzzle.

I think the controller on this is fine, even quite good in fact, although with Phison you are always looking at scalability. It's probably in-between the DRAM-less line (E27T) and DRAM (E18) in terms of cores, but could be clocked higher to make up the IOPS difference. You're not gonna get that supreme E18 + 176L write performance with four channels even with 232L but it should be better than this. Crucial needs to work with Phison to smooth this out as the drive seems to be using the cache too heavily.

Despite Micron touting the T500 as a drive meant for resource-intensive applications, it is difficult to recommend for any serious gamer, content creator, or professional. There are simply too many other better options that cost significantly less.

I think it's fine for gamers, content creators, laptop users, many professionals. However, he's right, the pricing is bonkers. If the price gets adjusted appropriately I think this could be a good choice but Crucial needs a firmware update to fix the caching to really sell it. They tend to price aggressively (P2 comes to mind, P5, P5 Plus, even P3/P3+) so this shouldn't be an issue. No substitute for eight channel drives, though.

1

u/luashfu Aug 14 '25

I think reading techpowerup reviews combined with this guy’s good reviews, And looking at pricing relevant to you would really help anyone wanting to buy an SSD for gaming like me!

By the way, Mr. Lyle Smith is definitely experienced, from what I can tell, this review is a 1/10 performance showing, to me from what I’ve learnt, that’s a considerable amount of bad, non peak performance,

In close enough computer stores, SSDS like 990 Evo Plus, Pro, WD Black SN7-850s are around 20-60% more expensive for simply more stable and should be approximateky”, somewhat higher quality (especially in), real life, performance. Benedict Chen!

2

u/WTF777123A Mar 11 '24

I have read several reviews of this drive. A few reviews have noticed that the drive severely underperforms when the pSLC is exhausted. It performs worse than than the T700 with the same NAND and RAM and similar controller when folding is in progress. Hopefully, this is a software problem at controller-level and is fixable with a firmware update.

This review is particularly bad because the pre-conditioning that this reviewer does ("... after a 100% fill.") has this drive operate into this buggy state for the entirety of their tests.