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ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL (BETA)
You may not see this for long (and its definitely not common) but you get a freebee simply for reading! Over the last little while, we have been assisting with beta testing new benchmark software called Anvil Storage Utilities which is an absolutely amazing SSD benchmarking utility. Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and utilize in our benchmark testing.
The Total Score of the M500 bettered the OCZ Vector and was just behind the Samsung 840 Pro SSD. High IOPS results of 84,634 are above listed specifications and, regardless of the queue depth that we threw at this SSD, the IOPS remained the same which pretty much unheard of.
The SSD Review uses benchmark software called PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Suite to create testing scenarios that might be used in the typical user experience. There are eight tests in all and the tests performed record the speed of data movement in MB/s to which they are then given a numerical score after all of the tests are complete. The simulations are as follows:
- Windows Defender In Use
- Streaming Data from storage in games such as Alan Wake which allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action
- Importing digital photos into Windows Photo Gallery
- Starting the Vista Operating System
- Home Video editing with Movie Maker which can be very time consuming
- Media Center which can handle video recording, time shifting and streaming from Windows media center to an extender such as XBox
- Cataloging a music library
- Starting applications
CRUCIAL M500 960GB SSD PCMARK VANTAGE RESULTS
Get ready for this one! In all of our SSD evaluations, we conduct Vantage testing at the beginning, and then again, at the end of the analysis. Normally, the results are very similar or, believe it or not, they may go up just a bit. In cases where something seems a bit out of the ordinary, we also repeat the tests a few times. This is just one of those situations.
Our initial test of the Crucial M500 SSD returned a Total Score of 71957, whereas our final test returned a total score of an astounding (and SSD leading) 76569 points. Repeat tests confirmed that this SSD actually did better once ‘broken in’. Looking at the individual test results, we observed that the high transfer speed reached was 421MB/s (a bottle neck it seems as we have seen a few at this mark yet not higher) and that all eight tests were SATA 3 level, another very rare result.
Our SSD Hierarchy displays the top 25 SSDs we have tested to date, rated by their PCMark Vantage Total Score alone. The Crucial m500 SSD is now the top dog on the block!
They are in Stock and 570.00 on Amazon. No forum link for this drive
Crucial M500 960GB SATA
2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal Solid State Drive
CT960M500SSD1
20nm nand and 25 nm nand is very hard to find which I find puzzling because Crucial makes their own nand. Hence this 960gb Crucial is not available at its 599.00 price anymore. Its out of stock at most vendors and as soon as its in stock its sold out in 5 minutes.
This is one heck of a drive! I want one.
Hey David my old friend. Good to see you jump in as always…been a few years hasnt it…
Nice performance for the price! Not so high end but can’t complain.
The performanc on this drive is rather unique. On one hand we can see where the Samsung and OCZ better it in areas such as IOPS and incompressible data performance but, on the other hand, it seemed to stand up to both in such things as the AS SSD and Anvil Total Scores and blew both away in Vantage Total Point Scoring.
Right as always Les. Well i consider the low 4k read the most important factor for ssd perf because it’s the only value that you can’t improve by RAID. Actually you might decrease it a bit. Drives with strong perf should be >35mb/s in 4k like m5pro or 840pro. I may be wrong though and feel free to correct me.
The drive has support for both TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE 1667 specifications. Having the
Opal 2.0 support means that you can utilize third-party encryption to
make the system more secure. It also provides full
compatibility with BitLocker encryption built into Windows 8. This is the
first SSD with explicit support for this feature. It also support’s Device Sleep (DEVSLP), a new standard which consumes less power between state changes, enabling fast exit latency and a more efficient energy profile. I have been reading the SSD review for many months now and really enjoy the articles and respect the attention to detail and repetition utilized during the testing procedures. Excellent work gentlemen.
Thanks Mark!!! Always looking for new site contributors and your background is solid!
Is it possible to show Host Read/Write-values with CDI?