Late last year the M500 series not only cemented Crucial's reputation as an industry leader but it also helped prove to consumers that there was another alternative to TLC NAND. By leveraging the power of Marvell's then top of the line 9187 controller and a strong relationship with IMFT through their parent company Micron, massive 128GBit ONFi 3 NAND ICs ushered in a new era of price vs performance. Since then Crucial and Marvell have learned many valuable lessons about the nature of these new ONFi 3 beasts.

These hard won lessons have now been distilled into an entirely new model called the M550 which uses only top-shelf ONFi 3 NAND, binned specifically for these SSDs.