At CES 2013 Crucial announced the release of their new M500 series SSDs. This new model was meant to replace the aging M4 series and push the SSD industry towards a more budget friendly direction.

On the broad scale, there is quite a substantial gap between solid state drives that offer up massive storage capacities and those that offer blazing performance, making the process of choosing a drive that offers both to a certain extent rather hard.

Over a year ago at CES 2013, Crucial teased us with the promise of a "Terabyte-Class" SSD that was coming later that year. They were of course talking about the M500 series - and more specifically the 960GB version.

Exceeds rated read and write speeds; 7mm low profile fits in many Ultrabooks and thinner laptops; Excellent compatibility; Decent 3 year warranty; Massive storage (for an SSD; Very affordable for a terabyte-class SSD

No desktop drive bracket included; No software bundle included in the box for migration

Let us summarise the most important positive and negative points below: As I said at the beginning, ‘ evolution' , is the word that describes the M500 and reflects the work that Crucial has put into this drive not only to make it faster than the M4, but also implement technologies such as hardware...

Outstanding operation as a system drive; Is able to achieve 80.000 IOPS without sweating; SATA 6Gbps support; 7mm thick SSD ready for Ultrabooks; Hardware data encryption; Very fast recovery from a used state; Adaptive thermal protection; 3 year warranty; Very well priced

None

My HP Pavilion has had a new lease on life. Windows starts up in about 25 seconds! A massive improvement. All apps start more quickly in Windows 7. Quite simple to install too.

For SSDs to become more cost effective they need to implement higher density NAND, which is often at odds with performance, endurance or both. Samsung chose the endurance side of the equation, but kept performance largely intact with the vanilla 840.

The previous M4 model by Crucial/Micron was launched back in 2011 and although it offered very good read speeds (up to 500MB/s) it did lack the punch needed in write speeds (up to 260MB/s) and 4KB random IOPS performance (read 45k/write 50k) to compete with the top models by other manufacturers so...

- Build Quality; - Very Good Overall Performance; - Features (RAIN & eDrive Support; - 3 Year Warranty; - Available In 960GB; - Price (For Some

- Bundle

The Crucial M500 (and the OEM-tailored Micron M500 ) are a new mainstream SSD family that offers a SATA 6Gb/s interface, Marvell controller, 7mm drive height and Micron's latest 20nm MLC NAND.

Highest capacity of any mainstream consumer SSD; Very attractive pricing; sub $600 for 960GB; Excellent performance/cost ratio

Corsair Neutron GTX; Intel SSD 520; Samsung SSD 840 Pro; Plextor PX-M5S; Crucial m4; OCZ Vector; Highest capacity of any mainstream consumer SSD; Very attractive pricing; sub $600 for 960GB; Excellent performance/cost ratio; Weaker performance than other mainstream SSDs