Crucial has become one of the biggest players in the consumer SSD market due to their excellent price/capacity/performance ratios (their SSDs consistently score highly in our own resident wizard’s reviews for some reason, after all). Now, the company is looking to lower price/GB even more as it launches the BX500 series to the market – available in capacities of 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB using Micron 3D NAND chips.
Yes, it’s a SATA III SSD. And yes, the SATA III connector really is a limiting factor in this SSD’s performance – but remember that SATA III controllers are much less costly than NVMe implementations. Sequential performance is rated for up to 540MB/s read and 500MB/s write (4K performance is sadly absent). The whole plethora of usual SSD technologies are here as well – multi-step data integrity algorithm, thermal monitoring, SLC write acceleration, active garbage collection, TRIM support, self-monitoring and reporting technology (SMART) and error correction code (ECC)… For the pricing, these are likely of the DRAM-less variety of SSDs, which means SLC caching is of utmost importance for performance. But pricing really is some of the lowest ever – Crucial is quoting $29.99 for the 120 GB model, $49.99 for the 240 GB one and $89.99 for 480 GB worth of BX500 storage. Crucial will start shipping out orders on August 31st.
Sources: Crucial BX500 Manual, Crucial BX500 Landing Page
