Crucial announced their new BX500 series SSDs. They did so quite silently at first, the press releases are a little shy and perhaps too shy as Crucial might have created the super value SSD (SATA3). The BX500 as such is just that, all about value, stuff that you drop in easily and add as fast storage. And with advertised performance numbers in the 540/500 MB/sec ranges It is available in 120, 240 and 480 GB versions offering that familiar performance at 540 MB/sec reads, 540 MB/sec writes (sequential). The official and Random Write IOPS for all models have not been listed, but hey, we can measure that. We've already mentioned that the prices on these units are just terrific, 29 bucks for the 120 GB model, 49 bucks for the 240 GB model and for 89 USD you can grab the 480 GB model. These are MSRP prices, so in a couple of weeks, you may expect even lower street prices.

The 120 GB version has a TBW (Terabytes written) value of 40 TB, that is 80 TB for the 240 GB model and 120TB written for the 480 GB model. That is a lower than normal for TLC NAND, and Crucial is not mentioning the NAND type used on its packaging or website. So we figured the BX500 is making use of QLC already, quad level cell NAND, a NAND technology that writes four bits per cell. However, after inquiring, they denied this and stated, it is TLC NAND. It is a DRAMless design product paired with the proven very reliable SM2258XT controller. To cope with the TLC write gap, Crucial created a big SLC written buffer on these SSDs.