Micron M500DC Enterprise SSD Review (480GB) – Great Write Performance At A Great Price

SERVER PROFILES

While synthetic workloads do a great job of testing the underlying technology and reporting easy to understand results, they aren’t always indicative of how the drive will be used by the end user. Workloads that simulate enterprise environments try to bridge that gap without being overly complex.

The database profile is 8K transfers, and 67% percent of operations are reads.

In our database profile testing, the M500DC performed great.  Only Intel’s SSD DC S3700 could match it in performance.  This is the exact type of test that Micron tailored the M500DC to do and it shows.

The fileserver profile is based on an 80% read/20% write mix. Its made up of blocksizes from 512 to 64K, each making up a different percentage of the access pattern. The pattern is: 512 bytes=10%, 1k=5%,2k=5%, 4k=60%, 8k=2%, 16k=4%, 32k=4%, 64k=10%.

Once again, the M500DC held its own against more expensive SSDs.  While it couldn’t quite beat out the Optimus Eco, it had another excellent showing.

The webserver profile is similar to the fileserver profile, but has some additional 128K and 512K accesses thrown in for good measure. Additionally, the profile is 100% read.s

This is an area where the M500DC struggled slightly.  The lower raw read performance kept the M500DC from keeping up with the other SSDs. Overall, the M500DC performed really well for enterprise workloads.  So long as the workload doesn’t contain 100% reads, the M500DC held its own against every other SSD that we have tested.

FINAL THOUGHTS

With the M500DC, Micron has an SSD that will be a compelling option to many enterprise customers.  Even though we expect the M500DC to be priced at the low end of enterprise SSDs, its performance is more closely matched with high-end SSDs.

Honestly, there are only a few things that we would change about the M500DC.  We wish the sequential speeds were higher for both reads and writes.  Random read performance could use a little boost, but we were able to get higher numbers than what Micron specified.  That’s actually a really short list, everything else about this SSD is great.

Random write performance is on par with drives that are twice the price.  This benefited most of our mixed workload tests, especially our database profile, where the M500DC was incredibly quick.  It’s not just raw speed that impressed us, it was also consistency.  While not the most consistent drive we have ever tested, it far surpassed SSDs in a similar price range.  At 2 drive writes per day (DWPD), the M500DC is also suited for more write intensive applications.  Throw in Micron’s impressive list of enterprise features, 2M hour MTBF and 5 year warranty, and you can feel confident that your data is safe.

If Micron can be as price competitive with the M500DC as they were with the M500, it has an absolute winner on their hands.