Pros & Cons
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- Available in both heatsink and non-heatsink versions
- Strong benchmark scores
- High-quality software included
- Compatible with PlayStation 5
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- Fairly high cost per gigabyte
Crucial T500 Specs
| Bus Type | PCI Express 4.0 |
| Capacity (Tested) | 2 |
| Controller Maker | Phison |
| Interface (Computer Side) | M.2 Type-2280 |
| Internal Form Factor | M.2 Type-2280 |
| Internal or External | Internal |
| NAND Type | TLC |
| NVMe Support | |
| Rated Maximum Sequential Read | 7400 |
| Rated Maximum Sequential Write | 7000 |
| Terabytes Written (TBW) Rating | 1200 |
| Warranty Length | 5 |
The Crucial T500 (starts at $89.99 for 500GB; $179.99 for 2TB with heatsink as tested) is Micron's latest internal solid-state drive (SSD). It's a step up from the Editors' Choice award-winning Crucial P5 Plus, featuring the latest components and increased throughput speeds. The T500 is fast, setting a new high score among PCI Express 4.0 SSDs in one of our benchmark tests, and provides robust security features and useful bundled software. It easily follows its predecessor as an Editors' Choice winner if you're seeking an elite PCIe 4.0 SSD.
Design: Top-Shelf Components, Including DRAM
The T500 is a four-lane PCI Express 4.0 drive employing 232-layer Micron TLC 3D NAND flash memory. It's manufactured on an M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) "gumstick" printed circuit board and uses the NVMe 2.0 protocol over the PCIe 4.0 bus, with a Phison E25 controller. Unlike many recent internal SSDs, the T500 includes a DRAM cache, which amounts to 1GB of LPDDR4 for every terabyte of drive capacity. (New to M.2 and PCIe jargon? Check out our guide to SSD terminology.)
The Crucial T500 is currently available without a heatsink in 500GB, 1TB, or 2TB capacities, and with an integrated heatsink in the two larger sizes (including the 2TB model seen here). According to Micron, a 4TB model should be available next year. [Editors' Note; The 4TB version is now available.] The passive heatsink is compact enough to fit in the expansion slot of a Sony PlayStation 5, and it easily meets Sony's criteria for use with the PS5.
The T500's list prices (see the table below) carry a bit of a premium over the Crucial P5 Plus, as well as the inexpensive DRAM-less SSDs that are currently in vogue. That said, the drive was discounted by $50 or so at Crucial.com at the time of this writing.
The T500's durability ratings (expressed in terms of lifetime write capacity in total terabytes written or TBW) match those of several other PCIe 4.0 speedsters. The Crucial P5 Plus carries the same rating of 300TBW, 600TBW, and 1,200TBW for 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB, respectively, and the Samsung SSD 990 Pro and WD Black SN850X are both rated at 600TBW for 1TB and 1,200TBW for 2TB. A few PCI Express 4.0 drives offer substantially higher durability ratings; the MSI Spatium M470, for example, is rated at 1,600TBW for 1TB and 3,300TBW for 2TB. At the other extreme, the Mushkin Delta, which uses less durable QLC memory, is rated at just 200TBW for 1TB, 400TBW for 2TB, and 800TBW for 4TB.
The TBW spec is an estimate, according to the manufacturer, of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. (TBW tends to scale 1:1 with capacity, as it does for the Crucial SSD.) The T500 is under warranty for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in writes, whichever comes first.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The T500 meets the TCG Opal security standard for self-encrypted drives, which includes AES hardware-based encryption. The drive also comes with the company's Crucial Storage Executive SSD management software suite, which is one of the better tools out there both in the scope of tasks it can run and its ease of use. Crucial also offers a download of Acronis True Image HD software for any disk migration tasks you might need to perform.
Testing the Crucial T500: Strong General Storage and Gaming Results
We test PCIe 4.0 internal SSDs using a desktop testbed with an MSI X570 motherboard and AMD Ryzen CPU, 16GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4 memory clocked to 3,600MHz, and a discrete Nvidia GeForce graphics card.
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We put the Crucial T500 through our usual suite of solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, and 3DMark Storage.
Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. In our Crystal DiskMark sequential speed testing, the heatsink-equipped Crucial T500 effectively matched its rated read and write speeds (it exceeded its read rating by barely half a percent and missed its rated write speed by an even slimmer margin). That's all we really look for in this benchmark, which acts as a reality check on a manufacturer's claimed throughput speed.
The field was closely packed, but the T500 narrowly led the other PCIe 4.0 drives in Crystal DiskMark's 4K read test, which measures how long it takes to access a group of files in 4KB cluster sizes. Its 4K write score was in the middle of the pack.
PCMark 10's overall storage test measures a drive's speed in a variety of routine tasks such as loading games and launching the Windows operating system and other programs. The T500 won this event, edging the heatsink-equipped Samsung SSD 990 Pro by 2%.
The Crucial drive's results in PCMark trace testing, which evaluates some of the individual components that go into the overall score, were mostly average, but it stood out in the file-copy tests. Its ISO (large-file) copy score was nearly 10% quicker than the next-closest SSD, the WD Black SN850X, and it narrowly beat the Samsung 990 Pro for the gold medal in small-file copying.
Finally, in 3DMark Storage (which evaluates an SSD's speed in a variety of gaming-related tasks), the T500 finished second in our comparison group, trailing only the WD SN850X.
Verdict: A Full-Featured, High-Speed PCIe 4.0 SSD
The Crucial T500 is a step up from the company's P5 Plus, with a memory and processor upgrade and a boost in throughput speed. Micron offers versions of the 1TB and 2TB stick with an integrated heatsink, which adds just $10 to the bare drive's price at either capacity. The heatsink-equipped T500 plays well with the PlayStation 5; meets the TCG Opal security standard; and comes with useful software.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Even better, the T500 performed superbly against other elite PCI Express 4.0 SSDs in our benchmark testing, posting excellent results in both general storage and gaming tests. True, the T500 came in second to the WD SN850X in the gaming-oriented 3DMark Storage test, but while the SN850X is a whiz at gaming, it finished only sixth in the PCMark 10 overall benchmark. As such, the Crucial T500 handily earns an Editors' Choice award as a high-performance PCI Express 4.0 drive.