Crucial's MX500 SSD was released in December of last year and is the first TLC drive that offers convincing performance that's similar to what MLC drives offer. Our initial review was of the 1 TB variant. Today, we take a look at the 500 GB version.

Just like its bigger 1 TB brother, the Crucial MX500 500 GB uses an SMI controller instead of the Marvell chips we saw on earlier MX-Series drives. It also uses Micron's own 64-layer 3D TLC NAND chips, which is a first for the company. While TLC chips provide cheaper cost per Gigabyte over more traditional MLC NAND, they also come with lower write performance. In order to work around that, Crucial designates a small, variably sized amount of memory as SLC cache, which writes a single bit to each TLC cell instead of three. While much faster, such a setup is basically a speed vs. size tradeoff. According to Crucial, the SLC cache is variably sized to provide the best performance.