Crucial has been making reliable cost effective mainstream SSDs for years now. Each new product release striving for better performance, reliability, and value. The recent release of the M550 built upon their M500, offering even better performance, but at a higher price point per GB. Because of this, Crucial needed to release a more modern lower budget drive.

They had already separated their product line of SSDs in the 2012 with their V4, offering a more budget friendly SSD. However, it turned out to be a bad move. To make the V4 cheaper they skimped out on the controller and used an unstable and slow Phison controller and firmware. This lead to users having windows freezing issues and real world performance was almost similar to HDDs besides boot times.