Crucial MX500

If you’re planning to store your data on anything, Jeremy Laird thinks that  you’re best going with the device with an extra two years of warranty.

- Jeremy Laird

The march of technology waits for no man. Unless the poor sap in question relies upon the SATA interface for his PC storage connectivity. In which case, technology is happy to sit down and soak up the view. That’s because of the limitations associated with SATA.

First, there’s a hard bandwidth limit of around 550MB/s, net of overheads. Then there’s the fact that SATA is reliant on the AHCI control protocol, which hails from the mists of 2004. Critically, it also means that AHCI was never conceived with solid-state storage in mind. It was designed to suit magnetic drives and read heads, not NAND chips.

One of the more obvious upshots is the practical cap it puts on random access performance. AHCI isn’t optimised to enable SSDs to give their best when it comes to random access performance. With that long-winded preamble in mind, may we present Crucial’s newest SSD, the MX500.