Crucial MX500 500GB 2.5” SSD Review

If your gaming PC is starting to show its age, one of the most affordable and effective upgrades you can make is to invest in a new solid-state hard drive. Even as recently as 3–5 years ago, the per-gigabyte cost of SSDs was prohibitive for some, but they’ve come down drastically in price, and some experts estimate they’ll drop as low as $0.10 per gigabyte by the end of 2020.

Competition among SSD manufacturers is fiercer than ever, and Crucial isn’t screwing around with the MX500. It’s one of the most affordable, versatile, and reliable solid-state drives we’ve seen in recent memory. Whether you need more storage space (and faster loading times) for your games or just more room for your system and media files, it’s almost impossible not to recommend the MX500.

Crucial MX500 Gaming Performance

*Note: This is a review of the 500GB SATA version of this drive. There are some differences between each version—mostly that the larger drives have longer lifespans—but they’re otherwise more or less the same product and you can confidently buy (or not buy) any of them based on this review.

There’s a lot of (mostly pointless) debate around the exact benefits and limitations of SSDs in gaming PCs. In this section, we’ll present and address some of the most common sources of controversy and confusion. If you’re not interested and just want the TL;DR version, here it is: the Crucial MX500 is an absolutely fantastic SSD for gaming and there’s virtually nothing else on the market that outperforms it on anything but a theoretical level.

If you poke around the internet and read other reviews of this drive, you’ll notice that many of them are quick to point out that it’s “just” a SATA drive, and that newer PCI Express SSDs are up to six times faster. Here’s the thing: that is both true and utterly irrelevant to almost everyone.

PCI Express SSDs are the newest, hottest thing in solid-state technology. That means they’re bonkers expensive. There are people who will realize significant benefits from them that SATA or M.2 SSDs can’t provide, but if you’re one of those people (professional video editors and server hosts, mostly), then you already know that.

If you’re just a gamer who wants your games to load fast, there is no reason to spend hundreds of extra dollars on a PCI Express drive. The end, full stop.

The MX500 is lightning-fast and ultra-reliable for most applications. Another thing you’ll notice in some other reviews is that this drive has a significantly shorter lifespan than some others. That’s true; Crucial estimates that you can write about 180TB of data to the 500GB model before its memory cells start to fail, whereas the popular Samsung 860 Pro lasts three times as long.

But like the SATA vs. PCI Express issue, that will only matter to a very small number of people. You’d have to write about 100GB of data to the drive every day, 365 days per year, for five years to hit that limit. Even hardcore gamers who play 40 hours per week will almost certainly not push their hard drives anywhere near that hard.

In short, there is a 99.5% chance that all of your other PC components will become obsolete long before your MX500 SSD needs to be replaced.

Crucial MX500 Design

The MX500 comes in two different form factors, and it’s important to select the right one for your rig. A majority of gamers will probably need the SATA version, which fits into any standard 2.5” drive bay (or a 3.5” bay, with a cheap conversion kit).

The M.2 version is much smaller and attaches directly to your motherboard, but you’ll need a compatible M.2 motherboard with a free slot—if you have one, you probably know. Other than their size, both versions are effectively identical.

One of our favorite things about the MX500 is the simple fact that every drive comes bundled with a copy of a program called Acronis True Image. When you install a new hard drive, you’ll likely want to copy stuff over to it. If you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, this can be a dangerous process, especially if you’re planning to move your operating system files; people accidentally wiping their whole hard drives isn’t unheard of.

True Image eliminates that risk by making it ridiculously easy to clone your existing hard drive. Just plug in both drives, start up the program, select the source and destination drives, and you’re done. Once you’re sure that everything is working properly, you can safely wipe and reuse or recycle the old drive.

Crucial MX500 Pricing & Alternatives

At the end of the day, the only thing that most gamers really need to care about when it comes to solid-state drives is a simple one: how much does it cost? Depending on size, the MX500 drives range from $0.10 to $0.158 per gigabyte, which is an aggressively competitive price (many other drives can cost $0.30 per gigabyte or more). Given its real lifespan and Crucial’s very generous 5-year warranty, its price is simply unbeatable.

Still, it’s always smart to research several different options. The Crucial MX500’s closest competitor is probably the Samsung 860 EVO, which is almost exactly the same drive, with two major differences: it costs a lot more, and it lasts a lot longer. (My PC has a 1TB 860 EVO that’s coming up on three years old.

No complaints so far, but I definitely would have bought an MX500 if it had existed back then.) Since almost nobody will ever wear either of those drives out, the MX500 is still a clear winner on price alone. The 500GB version beats its Samsung counterpart by $10, while the 2TB version is a whopping $62 cheaper.

For an almost identical alternative, consider the equally excellent Western Digital Blue 3D NAND drive. As of this writing, it’s $2 more than the MX500 for the 500GB model, and it, too, has a 5-year warranty. Its 500TB lifetime write limit beats out the MX500’s 180TB and the 860 EVO’s 300TB by a significant margin, but doesn’t quite stack up to the 860 Pro’s 600TB. (We still think those numbers almost never matter.)

Speaking of the Samsung 860 Pro—you’ll probably come across it if you’re researching other solid-state drives. Don’t be lured by its siren call. It costs more than twice as much as the MX500, but its gaming performance is virtually identical. The only people who truly need a drive that can write 600TB over its lifetime are those high-end video and server people we mentioned earlier. Save your money.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are Crucial SSDs good?

Crucial is one of the best SSD manufacturers out there, especially in recent years. With products like the MX500, they’re unquestionably one of the companies leading the charge that is bringing SSD prices down at incredible speeds.

Crucial’s most vocal critics tend to harp on the fact that some of the company’s solid-state drives don’t last as long as their competitors, but as we’ve explained in this review, we don’t think that’s a particularly fair or relevant criticism.

What is the most reliable SSD?

If by “reliable,” you mean well-built and least likely to fail prematurely, we’ve had great experiences with Corsair, Crucial, and Samsung drives over the years. Western Digital also makes generally good solid-state drives, though we’ve seen them fail slightly more often. We’ve had bad luck with Seagate drives, but we acknowledge that’s anecdotal—maybe it is nothing more than bad luck.

However, if by “reliable,” you mean “longest lifespan,” then most brands tend to outlast Crucial drives. But unless you’re writing an absolutely insane amount of data to the drive each and every day, that’s not going to matter. Virtually all gamers and casual users will see their Crucial (or other manufacturers’) drives become technologically obsolete long before they fail due to lifetime write limits.

What is the best 500GB SSD?

Up there in the title, where we said that we think the Crucial MX500 is one of the best solid-state drives in existence, we meant it. There are (a few) drives that are faster for certain very specialized applications, but none that give you as much overall value for your money.

That being said, the MX500’s closest competitors—the 500GB models of the Samsung 860 EVO and the Western Digital Blue 3D NAND drive—are both excellent SSDs as well. Performance-wise, you really can’t go wrong with any of them.

Is SSD or HDD better?

In 2020, there is just one respect in which HDDs (that is, optical hard drives) are better than solid-state drives. If you have a ton of data to store on a tight budget, but you don’t plan on needing to access it very quickly or very often, then a cheap, old-school HDD could be the way to go. They’re a great (but less reliable) alternative to paid cloud services if you just want to occasionally back up lots of stuff.

Other than that, though, SSDs outclass HDDs in every way. But if you’re more into HDDs, check out our guide on the best HDDs for gaming.

Which lasts longer, SSD or HDD?

On paper and under perfect laboratory conditions, HDDs usually outlive SSDs, but in terms of real people in the real world, that’s rarely the case. It’s true that SSDs deteriorate with use and HDDs don’t, but the rate of deterioration is so slow that you pretty much have to try (every day, for years and years) to wear one out. Conversely, HDDs have moving mechanical parts that can cause the whole drive to fail if they malfunction.

Why are SSDs so expensive?

Forgive the tongue-in-cheek response, but they’re not. If you haven’t bought one in a few years, it’s perfectly understandable that you’d still be under that impression, but SSDs have come down so far in price over just the last few years that it’s almost unbelievable. The average price of a solid-state drive has dropped roughly 25% (from about $0.40 to $0.30 per gigabyte) since 2016—and in 2012, they were closer to $1 per gigabyte.

Many industry experts fully expect SSDs to match or even beat HDD prices in the very near future, which will be super awesome for all of us.

Crucial MX500 Final Verdict

There are a lot of SSDs on the market, and few of them really stand out from the pack. The MX500 not only stands out, it truly leads the pack. Unless your full-time job is editing 4K video or maintaining entire banks of servers, there’s just no better solid-state drive out there.

Performance: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Yes, there are a small number of SSDs out there that will offer markedly improved performance to a small number of people. For the rest of us, the MX500 is about as good as it gets (and it’s very good).

Design: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The MX500 is as user-friendly as it is powerful and reliable. It’s easy to install, easy to clone, and it even comes in frustration-free packaging.

Price: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

If there’s a more affordable SSD on the market today that can even come close to the MX500’s tech specs, we haven’t found it.

Overall: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

We honestly can’t think of a reason that you shouldn’t buy this drive.