Product Description
Fuel your system performance with the Crucial® T500 Gen4 NVMe® SSD. Experience faster gaming and amp up your creative potential with an SSD that moves as fast as you need it to. Heavy tasks are no problem with better performance to power efficiency, and the T500 works with your laptop or desktop.
Dimension
Product Height : 0.09 inches
Product Width :0.86 inches
Product Depth :
Product Weight :0.35 ounces
Features
Lightning speeds Get incredible performance with sequential reads/writes up to 7,400/7,000MB/s and random read/writes up to 1.18/1.44M IOPs
Compatible Ready for performance with your laptop, desktop or motherboard, the T500 installs easily in your M.2 slot.
Ultimate gaming Load games up to 16% faster and get faster texture renders and less CPU utilization with Microsoft® DirectStorage
Content creation Get up to 42% faster performance in content creation apps, run heavy workloads, and render photos or videos faster
Easy to install Online tutorials, how-to guides, videos and free Acronis® True Image cloning software help you install your SSD, set it as your boot drive and migrate your data
Innovation Produced in house by Micron® with cutting-edge 232-layer TLC NAND
Spacious Store more games, UHD/8K+ media, apps, files and more with 2TB of capacity
What's Included
Reviews
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Wicked speeds. Huge capacity.
Wow ... Wicked fast transfer rates .... So setup was straight forward. Popped off the back of my predator laptop carefully. I used a star bit put the screws on painters tape for temp storage. Gingerly pried the backing off.of the laptop with a plastic prying tool. Removed the old 500 MB secondary hard drive. Inserted the 2 TB secured it with the screw. Reversed installed the bottom cover and booted the PC back up. Windows 11... Went to setup hard drives. Recognized the hard drive. Initialized it and I was left with just under 2 TB due to file allocation info... Went on to test transfer rates... Test folder with file size was just over 12 GB. Micro SD to HD was slow. Probably limited by Micro SD card. But from SDD to SDD... Holy cow..... I was getting almost 2 GB/s. Cover says up to 7.4 GB/s. I did not get there probably because my on board SDD is not rated over 3. FYI. This 12 GB of data is 4K video from my Vlogging camera. So I know there is a lot of data in these files. But my 12 GB of data was transferred so fast that I barely was able to click the mouse and take a photo to show the transfer speed I hit. Opening and playing the video was fine. No lag. No buffering or latency .. I will use this to store my game play data and my video content that I have or need to create using my video software. If you are looking for large storage and fast transfer speeds look no further. Good job Crucial .. I would recommend this product for what I reviewed it for.
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T500 joins the top-tier of Gen4 NVMe SSD Options
Crucial’s T500 SSD is their answer to WD and Samsung’s excellent PCIe NVMe Gen4x4 SSDs that have been on the market for awhile. They’ve also adopted a more clear cut naming convention that falls in line with their flagship Gen5 SSD, the T700, and now the T500 falls in place for Gen4 and starts making the product stack complete. Previously, Crucial sold Gen4 SSDs under the P3 and P3 Plus SKU, but I have a feeling they may rename these to T300 or something to fill out the round-up. I have a P3 Plus 1TB in my PS5 and it is fine for that, but compared to PC SSDs that can max out PCIe 4.0, it didn’t really compete. That’s where this T500 powered by the Phison E25 controller steps in, with Seq Read/Write speeds up to 7400/7000MB/s which is on par or better than the Samsung 980 Pro and 990 Pro drives and also the excellent WD SN850X. Crucial also has the ability to use their own Micron DDR4 DRAM and fast in-house NAND flash, with only the controller being farmed out, so Crucial really has a lot of control in the tech they put into this SSD. In terms of actual performance, this SSD did great. I got the version without heatsink because I wanted to put it in my gaming laptop and even under relatively sustained testing, it did not overheat or throttle. On my 13700HX MSI laptop, I was seeing 7077/6844 MB/s Seq Read/Writes and 924/728 MB/s RND4K in Crystal Diskmark. This was on par with my Samsung and WD drives within 10%, with the 990 Pro and WD SN850X eclipsing 7300/7000 MB/s read/write and performing better on random I/O as well. Still, compared to the Crucial P3 Plus, this is a huge improvement as that drive was in the 5000/4300 MB/s range with about half the random I/O as this T500. So while Crucial hasn’t exactly dethroned Samsung or WD on the high-end, don’t sleep on the T500 if you need a fast, well-priced Gen4 SSD from a rock solid brand like Crucial. I certainly trust this brand more than some of the other SSD makers out there since I have a lot of RAM and other products from Crucial and have used them over the years.
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You can have fast large storage at a great price!
I did not realize just how slow my current M.2 was until I was speed testing both drives. The Crucial T500 is BLAZING fast, just make sure you insert it into the Gen4 slot. On initial install I accidentally installed it in the Gen3 slot which led to confusion about the still fast, but not face-melting speeds I was expecting with specs that list “Sequential Read: 7400 MB/s, Sequential Write: 7000 MB/s.” After swapping slots of the M.2s, and having to reformat the drive, I could experience those speeds. Also, just as an FYI, Windows is smart enough to find the appropriate boot drive, even if you switch which slot the M.2 is plugged into! I did have to go into Disk Management for Windows to even recognize the drive at the start though which was a little surprising. In disk management I reformatted the drive and that’s when it appeared in File Explorer. I ran some UserBenchmark to compare the two drives and here’s what I found comparing my old Gen3 drive to the Crucial T500. Crucial is the second SSD performing 611% faster than others using UserBenchmark. Check out the photo for more data. SSD: M.2 PCIe SSD 1TB - 162.6% SSD: CT2000T500SSD8 2TB - 611.1% All in all, this is THE M.2 SSD to get if you are in the market and need an excellent balance between storage, speed, and price. You just need to be ready to do a little tweaking after install. Pros: Insane speeds Very good price Trustworthy manufacturer Cons: No OS migration tools included Not formatted for Windows out the box Wasn’t able to actually hit the quoted speeds, but came close!
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Alienware X17 Compatible
I’ve been using Crucial drives for many years now and have not had any compatibility issues so they are one of my go to brands when getting a new drive either as a main drive or as a secondary for storage/backups. I'm using this in my Alienware X17 laptop as a secondary drive and couldn't be happier. It runs fast and stays cool even with long gaming sessions "where my games are stored and the 2tb size gives me plenty of room for lots of games. Now when using with this X17 I did get the compatible heat spreader “with thermal interface material” for the proper installation, and luckily the laptop already had a screw installed in the secondary slot. Using Crystal Disk Mark 8.0 I easily got 6900+ MB/s read and 6400+ MB/s write speeds, which is really good for a SSD “at this price point” and simply blows away any spindle drive out there. When you are looking for either expanding on your main storage device or adding “if you have a M.2 slot available” storage space, you can’t go wrong with the drives offered by Crucial.
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Crucial T500 2TB NVMe
My gaming rig was quickly running out of space to hold installs of all the active games I am currently playing. I was super excited at the opportunity to upgrade to the new Crucial T500 2TB NVMe SSD. Installation was a breeze on my machine, and I chose after install to perform a brand new OS install vs cloning from my old drive. This ensured everything would be fresh and error free. Once booted up into my new installed OS, I ran some initial disk speed test, and while my read speed was in the upper 6000 MB/s range, by write speed was around 1000 MB/s, a far cry from Crucials anticipated numbers. I found that Bitlocker had enabled itself automatically. Upon disabling, and running a new test, I was getting 7000 MB/s read and write speeds. I also got in the 99% range using disk mark on the performance test tool. These are absolutely incredible speeds. Please note that this is a Gen 4 NVMe and to get speeds close to this, you need to have a motherboard capable of Gen 4 NVMe. Aside from just RAW numbers, everything else about my system is super fast and snappy. Installing applications (when not downloading online) are super fast. Copy files, moving around the operating system, start up and shutdown, are all blazing fast, taking only a matter of seconds to perform any test. Windows open instantly too. Gaming performance isn't held back either by this drive. If you have all the other appropriate components, the T500 SSD won't be a bottle neck for you. You will realize the maximum potential of your games. This new Crucial T500 SSD is built using a brand new Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND and uses Micron LPDDR4 DRAM, 1GB per 1TB of NAND flash If you're rocking Windows 11, this also takes advantage of Microsoft's DirectStorage optimization with Phison® I/O+ technology This drive packs some serious performance with an impressive amount of storage space. I am absolutely loving this addition to my gaming PC and will be happily recommending it, and using it in my future builds to come.
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Fast PCIe Gen 4 Drive - Plenty of Speed and Space
The Crucial T500 SSD is a PCIe Gen 4 NVME solid state drive. It fits into a standard M.2 slot with a 2280 drive form factor. This version of the T500 does not come with a heatsink, but rather has the typical heat spreader label found on most NVME drives. This didn’t affect me as my motherboard’s main slot comes with heatsink. I installed the T500 in my ASUS G16CH tower with an intel i7 13700KF CPU and custom ASUS B760M-A WIFI D4 motherboard. I moved the original NVME drive to slot 2 just below the GPU – both slots run at x4 PCIe Gen 4 speeds, but I wanted the T500 in slot 1 because of the heatsink and better airflow. I have used Crucial SSD’s for years and have had pretty good success. I have a P2, and a P5 NVME drive along with an older MX500 SATA SSD installed for years without issues. Looking up the drive with Reddit’s SSDBOT gives you a nice look at how it stacks up with other drives. It gets rated as a High-End NVME drive, and by the specs its right at the top of the PCIe Gen 4 speed rating. The only way to go faster is to jump up to Gen 5 based drives and spend 2.5-3x more for 50-80% speed bump. The current speed of this drive is rated at 7400/7000 read/write with 2500 P/E cycles for endurance. Physical installation was a breeze. Replacing or adding a PCIe based SSD is one of the easiest upgrades you can make. The drive does not come with a screw, so if your MOBO doesn’t have a spare you just need to track down an M2x3mm screw. I have a computer fastener kit, so I just pulled one from there. As far as software installation goes I figured I would give the Acronis drive cloning tool on Crucial’s website a try. I usually do a fresh install, but thought the clone might work a little better. I regretted it to be honest. It seemed to clone just fine, but after a few days I started noticing some glitches and some instability in Explorer. I eventually just wiped the drive and did a fresh install of Windows 11. The drive I replaced with the T500 was an OEM drive that ASUS sourced from Micron – something close to a Micron 2400. Micron happens to be the parent company of Crucial, so there’s that. It was a 1TB NVME drive that had QLC NAND chips and was also a PCIe Gen 4 drive. The T500 was an upgrade all around with some similarities. The obvious being the 2TB size over 1TB. Speed increases were also substantial as the T500 was almost 2X faster – R/W of 4500/3600 for the old drive and 7400/7000 for the T500. There are also some architectural advantages to the T500. The NAND chips used are TLC (triple layer cells), which have been around for years and are a mature technology. The TLC chips offer greater endurance over QLC and increased speeds. The controller used in the T500 is a Phison PS5025-E25 – the Phison lineup is used pretty heavily in higher end NVME drives, so that provides some confidence in its usage. I ran the drive through CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4 and I pretty consistently got around 7100 MB/s for read speeds and 6825 MB/s write speeds. This is a little below advertised but I would call it pretty close for my taste. There’s always some system overhead with this being the OS drive, so I can’t rule out that taking some bandwidth. For practical usage I redownloaded my Steam and Gamepass libraries to the new drive. Before I had to pick and choose what I wanted on the 1TB drive, and what I had to load from my SATA SSD or Hybrid Hard Drive. With 2 TB of storage I am just at 40% capacity used and I have plenty of space to grow my library. Launching games is a touch faster – load times are down noticeably for the larger games – MCC, Forza, Shadow of War. In some of the smaller/older games that get played the load times weren’t vastly different – 8 seconds dropping down to 6 seconds doesn’t register as much as 15-20 second improvement on the larger games. Compared to loading games from my HHD though – enormously faster. An HHD drive is already decently faster than a plain HDD, so I can only imagine the improvement you would see. I didn’t really have a chance to try out many other workloads – I haven’t gotten my Solidworks working after resetting my PC, but I do know that a faster drive is always welcome when I work on larger models. The jump from a SATA SSD to an NVME drive was a pretty big leap when messing around with large files, so I can only speculate that I should see further improvement going to the T500. As far as use cases are concerned I would suspect anyone looking for a large boot drive that has some speed would be interested in the T500. It doesn’t break the bank compared to the PCIe Gen 5 drives, and it is certainly fast enough to handle any gaming needs. If you have a laptop with only 1 M.2 slot this is definitely a drive to look at since you don’t have the luxury of multiple drive slots to spread your data around on. The durability of TLC NAND and the Phison controller would bring me some comfort if this was my PC’s only drive. Overall, this is a solid PCIe NVME drive. I don’t think you can really go wrong by choosing it.
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Very well-performing drive
This drive comes in 2 variants, one with a heatsink included, and this one, which does not have a heatsink. The one with the heatsink is designed/intended for the PS5, but would work in a PC as well, if you were interested in having extra cooling for your NVMe drive. You shouldn't need this unless your drive is an enclosed environment like the PS5. The drive is a Gen4 PCIe NVMe drive, meaning it can support double the bandwidth compared to a Gen3 PCIe slot. The maximum advertised read speed of this drive is 7400mb/s, so to get the most out of your drive, your m.2 slot should support PCIe x4 (for gen4) or PCIe x8 (for gen3). You'll need to check your motherboard specs to see what your motherboard supports. Advertised speeds of a drive are usually under ideal, perfect conditions, not necessarily real-world performance, but can help you compare drive performance. I ran CrystalDiskMark on this drive, and the read speeds regularly came close to 7000mb/s, which is really close to the advertised speed, which is really nice to see. And even though that's just a benchmark, testing it by loading games onto it seemed to reflect those top-notch speeds. This is a top-performing drive which I think will satisfy most people
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A top performing drive
As someone who is fortunate enough to own both the WD SN850X and the Samsung 990 Pro I can say confidently that the Crucial T500 is a contender and performs at the same levels trading some blows depending on the test/environment. As this is a high-end Gen 4 SSD. As seen by the specs below. Most specifically, up to 7,400 read, 7,000 write speeds, 232-layer 3D TLC NAND, Micron LPDDR4 DRAM, 1 GB per 1 TB of NAND flash, and Phison PS5025-E25 controller. Supports Microsoft Direct Storage and can be used PS5, PC, or laptop. For my testing I put it in my gaming laptop. Which is an Acer Predator Helios 16 (2023). I didn’t get max speeds, ~7,000 read and 6,900 write speeds. Which is extremely close to what I am getting with my SN850x and 990 Pro. The differences between them I don’t think is meaningful. Transferring large files (>200 GB) went quickly and stayed at high speeds throughout. Again, traded blows with both the SN850X and 990 Pro where no one was an easy winner. I didn’t have any issues with thermal throttling. But that will depend on how much of a demand you are constantly putting on it along with if you have a heat sink or not. Overall, great SSD that I have no complaints about. I can’t mention an increase in speeds or game loading times compared to my old drives as I’ve already been using high-end SSDs. But can say this is very similar and if I was doing blind testing, I wouldn’t be able to tell a difference. If you are using an HDD or a gen 3 SSD (and your PC supports a Gen 4 SSD) I highly recommend the upgrade. As there are a lot more things that are starting to utilize these faster speeds so you will see a difference in multiple aspects such as boot times, transferring large amounts of files, loading files, texture loading in games, games loading up, and loading screens to name a few. Especially, with games that support Microsoft Direct Storage. The 5-year warranty is greatly appreciated and has multiple features to keep it fresh and as fast as possible. SPECS: Built for gaming, photo/video editing and high workload applications. Gen4 high-end 2280 M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD. 232-layer 3D TLC NAND Up to 7,400 MB/s read speeds and Up to 7,000 MB/s write speeds. But this varies a bit depending on storage size. Random read/write speeds up to 1.18/1.44 IOPs 2280 M.2 SSD Supports Microsoft DirectStorage Comes with or without integrated heatsink Supports, 500 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB capacities. With a 4 TB option to be available sometime 2024. Supports PS5, desktops, and laptops. Micron LPDDR4 DRAM, 1 GB per 1 TB of NAND flash Phison PS5025-E25 Controller Microsoft DirectStorage optimized with Phison I/O+ technology 5-year warranty Static and dynamic SLC caching Redundant array of independent NAND (RAIN) Multi-layer data integrity algorithms Adaptive thermal protection Data protection for power loss events TRIM support SMART monitor technology Error Correction Code (ECC)
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Getting close the PCIE 4 limits
I was looking forward to seeing if this can beat my high performing SSD and the limitations of PCIE-G4 currently. In summary I think we are getting close. I tried the stock 1TB OEM SSD that is a PCIE G4 and the game performance can be choppy at times. The initial logging in can be choppy. I think this is attributed to the drive’s limits. Then I moved onto a high-performance other brand Gaming 2TB PCIE G4 SSD and that added that little extra performance. The system runs smoother overall. The benchmarks were definitely better. Now enter the Crucial T500. When installing the drive, I was not sure how much it could improve. I followed the guides for Disabling Core Isolation in Windows 11. Then I proceeded to play some gaming matches in Forza, Fortnite and GTA 5. The performance seemed a little faster but it was hard to express how much. I did run a synthetic benchmark pictures attached. The speeds are better and worse by a little in some aspect but the drive so far is the best I have used. Crucial is very accurate on the advertised specs. That being said it is still running Windows and all the other things in my tray while this test is run. Pretty impressive. The only other thing that I was looking for was the improved battery life but that was hard to find since this is a powerful gaming laptop running an RTX 4090 so it would be hard to spot. Overall, I am very happy with the performance and the price point of the drive. The only other concern is if one was looking for more performance than waiting for PCIE G5 drives to come out with the 2024 line of notebooks yet to come or being announced currently. I feel like we are at a limit with the spec standard.
