Crucial - T500 2TB Internal SSD PCIe Gen 4x4 NVMe M.2

Incredibly fast for the price. Crucial has really done it with this one.

I’ve been using Crucial drives for many years now and have not had any compatibility issues so they are one of my go to brands when getting a new drive either as a main drive or as a secondary for storage/backups. I'm using this in my Alienware X17 laptop as a secondary drive and couldn't be happier. It runs fast and stays cool even with long gaming sessions "where my games are stored and the 2tb size gives me plenty of room for lots of games. Now when using with this X17 I did get the compatible heat spreader “with thermal interface material” for the proper installation, and luckily the laptop already had a screw installed in the secondary slot. Using Crystal Disk Mark 8.0 I easily got 6900+ MB/s read and 6400+ MB/s write speeds, which is really good for a SSD “at this price point” and simply blows away any spindle drive out there. When you are looking for either expanding on your main storage device or adding “if you have a M.2 slot available” storage space, you can’t go wrong with the drives offered by Crucial.

The Crucial T500 SSD is a PCIe Gen 4 NVME solid state drive. It fits into a standard M.2 slot with a 2280 drive form factor. This version of the T500 does not come with a heatsink, but rather has the typical heat spreader label found on most NVME drives. This didn’t affect me as my motherboard’s main slot comes with heatsink. I installed the T500 in my ASUS G16CH tower with an intel i7 13700KF CPU and custom ASUS B760M-A WIFI D4 motherboard. I moved the original NVME drive to slot 2 just below the GPU – both slots run at x4 PCIe Gen 4 speeds, but I wanted the T500 in slot 1 because of the heatsink and better airflow. I have used Crucial SSD’s for years and have had pretty good success. I have a P2, and a P5 NVME drive along with an older MX500 SATA SSD installed for years without issues. Looking up the drive with Reddit’s SSDBOT gives you a nice look at how it stacks up with other drives. It gets rated as a High-End NVME drive, and by the specs its right at the top of the PCIe Gen 4 speed rating. The only way to go faster is to jump up to Gen 5 based drives and spend 2.5-3x more for 50-80% speed bump. The current speed of this drive is rated at 7400/7000 read/write with 2500 P/E cycles for endurance. Physical installation was a breeze. Replacing or adding a PCIe based SSD is one of the easiest upgrades you can make. The drive does not come with a screw, so if your MOBO doesn’t have a spare you just need to track down an M2x3mm screw. I have a computer fastener kit, so I just pulled one from there. As far as software installation goes I figured I would give the Acronis drive cloning tool on Crucial’s website a try. I usually do a fresh install, but thought the clone might work a little better. I regretted it to be honest. It seemed to clone just fine, but after a few days I started noticing some glitches and some instability in Explorer. I eventually just wiped the drive and did a fresh install of Windows 11. The drive I replaced with the T500 was an OEM drive that ASUS sourced from Micron – something close to a Micron 2400. Micron happens to be the parent company of Crucial, so there’s that. It was a 1TB NVME drive that had QLC NAND chips and was also a PCIe Gen 4 drive. The T500 was an upgrade all around with some similarities. The obvious being the 2TB size over 1TB. Speed increases were also substantial as the T500 was almost 2X faster – R/W of 4500/3600 for the old drive and 7400/7000 for the T500. There are also some architectural advantages to the T500. The NAND chips used are TLC (triple layer cells), which have been around for years and are a mature technology. The TLC chips offer greater endurance over QLC and increased speeds. The controller used in the T500 is a Phison PS5025-E25 – the Phison lineup is used pretty heavily in higher end NVME drives, so that provides some confidence in its usage. I ran the drive through CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4 and I pretty consistently got around 7100 MB/s for read speeds and 6825 MB/s write speeds. This is a little below advertised but I would call it pretty close for my taste. There’s always some system overhead with this being the OS drive, so I can’t rule out that taking some bandwidth. For practical usage I redownloaded my Steam and Gamepass libraries to the new drive. Before I had to pick and choose what I wanted on the 1TB drive, and what I had to load from my SATA SSD or Hybrid Hard Drive. With 2 TB of storage I am just at 40% capacity used and I have plenty of space to grow my library. Launching games is a touch faster – load times are down noticeably for the larger games – MCC, Forza, Shadow of War. In some of the smaller/older games that get played the load times weren’t vastly different – 8 seconds dropping down to 6 seconds doesn’t register as much as 15-20 second improvement on the larger games. Compared to loading games from my HHD though – enormously faster. An HHD drive is already decently faster than a plain HDD, so I can only imagine the improvement you would see. I didn’t really have a chance to try out many other workloads – I haven’t gotten my Solidworks working after resetting my PC, but I do know that a faster drive is always welcome when I work on larger models. The jump from a SATA SSD to an NVME drive was a pretty big leap when messing around with large files, so I can only speculate that I should see further improvement going to the T500. As far as use cases are concerned I would suspect anyone looking for a large boot drive that has some speed would be interested in the T500. It doesn’t break the bank compared to the PCIe Gen 5 drives, and it is certainly fast enough to handle any gaming needs. If you have a laptop with only 1 M.2 slot this is definitely a drive to look at since you don’t have the luxury of multiple drive slots to spread your data around on. The durability of TLC NAND and the Phison controller would bring me some comfort if this was my PC’s only drive. Overall, this is a solid PCIe NVME drive. I don’t think you can really go wrong by choosing it.