Crucial's MX500 is one of the most successful SSDs on the market, thanks to its great performance at an amazing price point. At launch only 2.5" SATA models were available, now the M.2 form factor drives are shipping, too - with no price increase.

Just like the SATA models, the Crucial MX500 M.2 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.