As much as we want the unbelievable performance that we see in PCIe M.2 SSDs, the name of the game today is capacity and the number of e-mails received from people looking for higher capacity SSDs is amazing.

The Crucial M500 solid-state drive may be at the bottom of our lineup, but it can still hold its own. This SSD is quick and efficient and will do the job in just about any machine. A Marvell controller drives this device along with MLC flash-component technology and SATA 3 compatibility.

The Crucial M500 solid-state drive is fast; and Crucial has fantastic help and support options

This is a 2.5-inch form factor SSD that does not come with a 3.5-inch mounting kit

There was nothing special or remarkable about installing the device (it did come with two mSATA sized screws tho), and consecutively installing Windows 7 Pro on it was a breeze on my Lenovo Y500.

The big news surrounding the Crucial M500 during CES this year was the shockingly low price per GB. The price of a 960GB for $599 brings the price per GB down to 63 cents. This is the lowest price on the market, and with Crucial's solid reputation in the SSD space it makes for a safe bet.

Crucial's M500 offers the lowest price per gigabyte for an MLC SSD with enterprise-class features not seen on typical consumer SSD data drives. With new 128Gbit MLC NAND paired with the Marvell 9187 controller the M500 should deliver great performance at a historically low price point.

The M500 Series from Crucial won't win any extreme performance awards but it's certainly fast enough for virtually anyone and the price per usable GB of the 480Gb and 960GB drives is extremely attractive.

The Crucial M500 fundamentally changes the math for SSD performance. It's not so much the drive as the underlying 128Gb NAND chips, which have double the capacity of the flash dies used in most other SSDs.

At the CES 2013 conference earlier this year Crucial announced the successor to its popular m4 series of SSDs. The new M500 series uses the new Marvell 88SS1987 controller and Micron 20nm MLC flash memory. We had to wait a few months, but now the new M500 is finally available.

But even the blue-hued chip giant must have been somewhat surprised by just how cutthroat this SSD marketplace has become. While SSDs may never quite reach parity with HDDs when it comes to price per gigabyte, they have become sufficiently less expensive to make the combination of a small SDD (for...

Today we have in our labs the latest SSD offering by Crucial, the Crucial M500 series. Announced earlier this year at CES, it is the world's first SSD series to use Micron's new 128Gbit MLC NAND die.