Crucial M550 SSD Review (1TB) – Increased Speed, Capacity and Value

It’s been some time since Crucial introduced the M500 Series SSD and, as it was when first released, the M500 remains to be a top value premium SSD offering. At $439 for a 960GB M500, this translates to .43/GB which is still lower than some premium SSDs of half that capacity.  Not so much a difficulty with respect their  target market, performance of the M500 family was a bit lower than the competition, although Crucial seemed hit a bulls eye when considering capacity and value.

Today’s introduction of the Crucial M550 SSD family is intended to cross that speed hurdle, offering the consumer the perfect combination of performance, capacity and value.  Crucial has accomplished this, not only through introduction of a new Marvell SATA 3 controller, but also by effectively using both 128Gb NAND, as well as 64Gb NAND, to tackle the performance numbers we saw in the M500. Will the Crucial M550 have what it takes to conquer the SSD triangle of speed, capacity and value?

Crucial M550 1TB SSD Closer

CRUCIAL M550 SSD SPECIFICATIONS

The Crucial M550 family consists of 2.5″ notebook, mSATA and M.2 form factors, all available in capacities of 128, 256 and 512GB capacities with the notebook SSD also available in 1TB.  The M550 is a self encrypting drive with several highlighting features to include Native Write Acceleration, Adaptive Thermal Protection, AES 256-Bit hardware encryption, SMART, ECC, TRIM, and compliance with TCG Opal 2.0, IEEE01667 and Microsoft E-Drive.

Crucial M550 1TB SSD Performance Specifications2

Listed Crucial performance specs show consistent performance at all capacities with exception to 128GB.  The M550 has a 3 year limited warranty, is a low power SSD and is capable of SATA DEVSLP (Device Sleep)with an under 3mW power rating.

Crucial M550 512GB Report at Technology X.

PRICING AND AVAILABILITY

The Crucial M550 SSD will be available at the time of this reports publishing (Check here!blank) and Crucial has identified this SSD as being a 15-20% price increase on the M500 SSD.  The goal of the M550 is to attract power users and gamers, while still holding a very competitive price point with that high 1TB capacity point.  When calculating current pricing, we should see the 1TB capacity of the M550 at the low $500 mark.  Check Amazon pricing!blank

M550 PACKAGING AND COMPONENTS

The Crucial M550 is a 7mm notebook SSD which also includes a 7mm to 9.5mm spacer for older systems.  Exterior packaging consists of a simple cardboard exterior of minimal detail.

Crucial M550 1TB SSD Exterior FrontCrucial M550 1TB SSD Exterior BackThe M550 itself is of a brushed gold aluminum construction, the PCB screwed into the aluminum casing and then protected by an aluminum base plate.  One of the screws that secure the base plate is covered with security tape and damaging this sticker will void the warranty.

Crucial M550 1TB SSD FrontCrucial M550 1TB SSD BackThere is a green colored printed circuit board (PCB) inside the exterior casing that contains the Marvell 8 channel 88SS9189 controller, 16 modules of Micron NAND flash memory, as well as two Micron cache memory chips.

Crucial M550 1TB SSD PCB Front

There is a thermal pad that is on the exterior casing and sits upon the controller to dissipate heat, this also resulting in the branding being a bit difficult to photograph.

Crucial M550 1TB SSD Controller

By using the Micron FBGA Decoder, we can identify this memory as having the product number MT29F512G08CKCABH7.  It is 20nm mlc NAND flash memory with each module being 64GB in capacity.  Although the total RAW capacity of this SSD is 1024GB, the user will only have 954GB at his disposal for storage .

Crucial M550 1TB SSD PCB Back

Like the M500 family, the M550 contains power capacitors that ensure your data is safely stored should a power failure occur.  Even with the M500 having been released just under a year ago, this remains to be a feature not seen in the consumer SSD arena.

Crucial M550 1TB SSD Capacitors

25 comments

  1. blank

    Timing was good for the 550…the 500 was quickly slipping to the under-performing ranks of the asynch value drives. Best thing from this new launch was the decision to bring back 64Gb die and thus the very desirable jump in performance with the 128GB drives. Combine that with power protection and good crypto and you have an unmatched offering that is perfect for those looking for a dependable/affordable ssd for their lappy. Doubtful anyone without their own nand fab will be able to follow suit re: the 128GB offering. Well played indeed.

    • blank

      Well to be fair, async drives tend to perform MUCH worse than m500. Remember, its not all about sequential speeds. m500 is performing just fine, especially given the price.
      And m550 is not meant to replace m500 in any way, it’s just a better performing verison of m550. m500 is here to stay (atleast according to crucial)

      • blank

        The m550 is a better performing version of m550? This is a Mark II or something?

      • blank

        Hello mr necro-poster, he clearly meant to say:
        “And m550 is not meant to replace m500 in any way, it’s just a better performing verison of m500.”

        The differences are very marginal though, see the Anandtech review…
        Unless prices have come down a lot more since the review, the M500’s a better buy.

      • blank

        couldn’t agree more, I upgraded my MBP 2012 which is loaded with gigs of music (Hi Re Albums Arts) many applications. I’m so happy right now, as long as it preform and launch my application so fast.

  2. blank

    how does the Native
    Write Acceleration of the m550 work? is it a cache of some sort similar
    to how samsungs 840 evo turbowrite feature works? would i lose all unwritten data if their is a system error? can it be turned off?

    • blank

      I believe its just a marketing thing for highspeed writes caused by using smaller dies (and thus more of them for a given capacity).
      Crucial unlike other competitors isn’t using any kind of tricks to achieve writes speeds such as turbowrite and performance mode.

  3. blank

    what is the m.t.t.f./m.t.b.f. and the t.b.w. for it?

  4. blank

    Great review Les 🙂

  5. blank

    Oh man, this is awesome! I was about to purchase a SanDisk X110 or X210 for my Drobo, but I’m liking this! Let’s see some M550’s as loss leaders at Slickdeals, huh? haha…thanks for another great review! You are THE SSD man! ~

  6. blank

    Thinking of upgrading my msata ssd for the samsung series 9 ultrabook (ivy bridge).

    Was planning on buying the: Samsung 840 EVO Series mSATA MZ-MTE500 500GB

    Is this new Crucial drive worth considering? Crucial M550 mSATA 512GB

    Are there any pros and cons, or any better alternative (type 500gb msata drives)?

    Afraid of wearing and tearing, is it true that the Crucial potensially could last longer, because of the NAND-type?

    Had a Corsair drive that got worn out and failed (almost 4 years old), good I had a fearly new backup 🙂

    Are there any pros and cons, or any better alternative?

  7. blank

    I will purchase the M500 or possibly the M550 over the Sam. 840 EVO as for me reliability and ability to take a huge workload (have several databases, VMs and dev envs running in parallel). The Samsung uses the significantly less reliable three-bit-per-cell NAND. I often write over 40GB a day.

  8. blank

    I could only get the Crucial SSD to work in my Olde PC.
    So; I bought one. M550 512Gb.
    The good & the bad….

    The GOOD.
    It works with SATA1 Motherboards (from 2006); on XP 32-bit in an Athlon 64 (x2) rig. Fresh XP install.

    The BAD.
    Speeds are a train-wreck for SSD`s.
    (Used the quick & simple `AS SSD Benchmark` tool)
    It told me immediately that my SSD was:- “pciide-BAD” (PCI via IDE for the SATA port)
    It told me immediately that my rig is:- 31K-BAD (not sure what that `limit` is)

    SCORES…. (*XP Athlon64 [2006 rig])
    Around 98 & 102 R/W in Seq. New rigs get well over 450)
    Around 17 & 29 in 4k
    Around 20 & 32 in 4k~64

    Final Scores are… 47 Write 70 Read
    Combined score 149.
    When modern rigs get a `Combined score` of well over 1,000.

    QED
    SSD`s can be relatively useless for an Olde PC.
    It will probably end up in a more modern laptop when the Athlon dies a death.

    • blank

      I can’t say as I agree with that at all, and I have watched the transition of many older PCs after installing SSDs for friends. As true as it is that you won’t reach the upper speeds of the SSD, most people would never in any case through typical use. The magic of the SSD is in access times, quicker startups and much faster regular system operation. This is the magic of the SSD for those older systems. It is like a shot of adrenaline.

      • blank

        I agree, where you are talking about SATA2 PC`s. Not 2005/2006 SATA1~SATA IDE models.

      • blank

        I started i SSDs back in 07 and remember IDE very well. For the most part, it only reduces performance by 15%, however, disk access remains the same with respect to start and operating system use. I cannot speak for older systems and thank you for your opinion as this ‘lack of performance’ is the first I have heard of this.

      • blank

        Its not all about the numbers benchmarks spit out. Yes, due to sata1 and IDE mode, speeds on paper are crappy, but they are still order of magnitude better than any harddrive out there. And access times, soo much better.
        I’m using vertex2 (yes, those infamous crappy ssds) and its works magic on my crappy atom netbook (which is also sata1).

        Just swap out to older drive and you’ll see 🙂
        Also you try and play with alignment (xp formats does it inproperly for ssds) and storage drivers for amd (instead of just using builtin ones).

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