This is probably the most excited I've been about any SSD launch in quite a while. At CES this year, Crucial announced its M500 SSD - the world's first to use Micron's new 128Gbit MLC NAND die. Courtesy of the cost savings and density increase associated with this new 128Gbit NAND, the M500 would be available in a 960GB capacity, priced at $599. That works out to be around $0.62 per GB for a truly gigantic drive by today's standards. It's exciting. For the past five years I've been learning to live off of less storage that I thought I needed, but the M500 had the potential to spoil me once again.

The M500 starts out with a familiar refrain: a Marvell controller with custom firmware from Crucial/Micron and of course, Micron NAND. All of these parts get updated though, some in more interesting ways than others. The controller is now Marvell’s 88SS9187, an updated version of the 9174 used in the m4. The 9187 is a speed/feature bump over the 9174 and is also used in Plextor’s M5 Pro. I should note that this time around both the Crucial (end user) and Micron (OEM) drives will feature the same M500 branding.

One of the benefits of Marvell’s 9187 is the support for DDR3 memory, which we see exercised on the M500. In its largest configuration, the M500 features 1GB of DDR3-1600. Crucial claims only 2 - 4MB of user data ever ends up in this DRAM, the overwhelming majority of the DRAM is used to cache the page/indirection table that maps logical block addresses to pages in NAND. Like most SSD makers, Crucial won’t talk about the structure of its mapping table but given the size of the DRAM I think it’s safe to assume that we’re looking at a relatively flat structure that should be easy to manage (more on this later).

Crucial / Micron M500 Specifications
  120GB 240GB 480GB 960GB
Controller Marvell 88SS9187
NAND Micron 20nm 2bpc MLC NAND (128Gbit die)
Form Factor 2.5" 7mm/9.5mm, mSATA, M.2 2.5" 7mm/9.5mm, mSATA, M.2 2.5" 7mm/9.5mm, mSATA, M.2 2.5" 7mm/9.5mm
Sequential Read
500MB/s
500MB/s
500MB/s
500MB/s
Sequential Write
130MB/s
250MB/s
400MB/s
400MB/s
4KB Random Read
62K IOPS
72K IOPS
80K IOPS
80K IOPS
4KB Random Write
35K IOPS
60K IOPS
80K IOPS
80K IOPS
Drive Lifetime 72TB Writes (90% full, 25/75% sequential/random IO - 50% 4KB, 40% 64KB, 10% 128KB)
Warranty 3 years

While the M500’s controller is nothing new, its NAND is. The M500 is the first drive to ship with the latest version of IMFT’s 20nm MLC NAND, featuring 128Gbit die. All previous NAND devices from IMFT (as well as its competitors) top out at 64Gbit (8GB) per 2-bit MLC NAND die. The move to larger die decreases the number of die/devices needed to hit each capacity point, and it also makes 1TB SSDs cost effective for the first time ever.

The cost savings come from the fact that these 128Gbit die aren’t simple doublings of last year’s 64Gbit devices; they include a few changes. The most prominent is a shift in page size from 8KB to 16KB. Larger page sizes are more desirable to implement at smaller NAND geometries, which is why you normally see these page size transitions with major shifts in process technology (e.g. 4KB to 8KB page size transition back at 25nm). The good news is that larger page sizes increase sequential throughput, but at the expense of latency. Given that NAND program times increase with smaller NAND geometries, once again the deck is stacked against manufacturers looking to increase performance as they exploit the benefits of Moore’s Law.

The other big change with the 128Gbit implementation of IMFT’s 20nm process is the inclusion of ONFI 3.0 support. There are some power savings courtesy of ONFI 3.0 (lower voltages, on-die termination), but the big news here is an increase in max interface speed. The previous ONFI interface standard (2.x) topped out at around 200MB/s, while ONFI 3.0 kicks that up to 400MB/s. Crucial’s implementation seems to be limited to around 330MB/s, but the drive isn’t anywhere close to saturating that. Remember the interface speed governs the maximum rate at which you can transfer data to/from a NAND device. Most NAND devices are capable of dual-channel operation so in the higher capacity implementations we’re talking about a maximum NAND-to-controller transfer rate of over 600MB/s. There’s more than enough headroom here.

Supporting the new controller, new NAND die, larger page sizes and ONFI 3.0 obviously require a new firmware, so the M500 ships with an evolution of what Crucial developed for the m4. The end result is vastly improved performance across the board, the big question being how well does it compare to the rest of the world given how much has changed since the m4 first arrived on the market.

The 20nm 128Gbit NAND: Larger Pages, Larger Blocks, Lower Performance & Cost?

Intel/Micron NAND Evolution
  50nm 34nm 25nm 20nm 20nm
Single Die Max Capacity 16Gbit 32Gbit 64Gbit 64Gbit 128Gbit
Page Size 4KB 4KB 8KB 8KB 16KB
Pages per Block 128 128 256 256 512
Read Page (max) - - 75 µs 100 µs 115 µs
Program Page (typical) 900 µs 1200 µs 1300 µs 1300 µs 1600 µs
Erase Block (typical) - - 3 ms 3 ms 3.8 ms
Die Size - 172mm2 167mm2 118mm2 202mm2
Gbit per mm2 - 0.186 0.383 0.542 0.634
Rated Program/Erase Cycles 10000 5000 3000 3000 3000

There's a lot of data in the table above, but if you look closely you'll see a couple of trends. The obvious ones are increasing page and block size over time. NAND program latency has also climbed steadily over the years, while endurance decreased. All in all, the picture looks pretty bleak. It's impressive that performance keeps going up each generation given how much the deck is stacked against seeing continued performance improvements. The increase in program time gives you a preview of what we're going to see in the performance pages. Small writes will take longer. Garbage collection routines on a full drive will also take longer to run as each block that needs to be recycled for use has more pages and more data to deal with. Although Crucial uses a faster controller in the M500 vs. m4, the internal housekeeping it has to do goes up tremendously as well. The M500 isn't a drive that was built in pursuit of peak performance. Instead this drive targets the mainstream.

Looking at the difference in density between the two 20nm NAND devices, there's nearly a 17% increase in density from moving to the larger page/block sizes. It's a remarkable improvement especially when you consider the gains are decoupled from a new process node. Ultimately this is Micron's answer to TLC for the time being. Rather than sacrificing endurance to get to lower price points, the 20nm 128Gbit 2bpc MLC NAND device at mature yields should deliver competitive pricing at higher endurance. Indeed this is the message behind Crucial's M500. The company isn't targeting Samsung's SSD 840 Pro, but rather the TLC based 840.

Price Comparison
  120/128GB 240/256GB 480/512GB 960GB
Crucial M500 $129 ($129) $219 ($202) $399 ($442) $599 ($570)
Intel SSD 335 $181 $220 - -
Samsung SSD 840 $100 $169 $333 -
Samsung SSD 840 Pro $139 $229 $463 -

The reality of it all is the M500's MSRPs are closer to the 840 Pro's street prices than the 840's. MSRPs tend to run a bit high on SSDs, so I wouldn't be too surprised to see the M500 eventually settle down closer to the 840 (remember the MSRP for the 840/840 Pro at 250/256GB are $199 and $269, respectively). It's definitely a different approach to driving costs down vs. going to TLC, and it's one that can't necessarily be repeated each generation, but for now the answer works. I'm not sure how meaningful the added endurance is for most client users, although you could make an interesting case for the M500 in some enterprise workloads that the TLC 840 wouldn't be able to make it into.

 

The big news is of course the 960GB capacity point. At $599 the 960GB M500 is by far the cheapest drive available at anywhere that capacity. A quick search on Newegg reveals a $1000 Mushkin 960GB drive and a $3000 1TB OCZ Octane. At $599, the 960GB is a steal at $0.62/GB. Even the Phison based 960GB BP4 from MyDigitalSSD weighs in at $799, and OWC's Mercury Electra MAX (3Gbps SATA) is still over $1000. To put the drive's excellent price in perspective, the 960GB M500 has roughly the same MSRP as Intel's 80GB X25-M had back in 2008. That's an order of magnitude more storage capacity at the same price in 5 years time. Moore's Law makes me happy.

Encryption Done Right & Drive Configurations
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  • RU482 - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link

    I have had an M500 mSATA 120GB running Anvil Storage Utilities for a couple weeks now. Like the Intel 535 30GB and 240GB, the M500 120GB is slower and runs hotter than Sandisk 64GB X100 and x110 evals I'm also testing
  • teiglin - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link

    How long would it take to run the Destroyer on a HDD? Or is that too depressing to consider? :)
  • andrew-1983 - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link

    The AS-SSD incompressible sequential read numbers seem rather low, in other reviews it's around 490MB/s, not 390, both for the 960GB and the 480GB size. Or am I missing something?
  • philipma1957 - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link

    I am waiting on my 960gb an amazon preorder. I will build a mac mini fusion with the 1tb hgst 7200 rpm hdd. my quad 2.3 mini will also have 16gb ram kingston plug n play.
  • philipma1957 - Wednesday, April 17, 2013 - link

    all my gear came on tues I set up the mini and it now has a 1.96tb fusion drive. very nice machine with a very nice ssd.
  • danielmorris - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link

    Once you get the new destroyer benchmark done and most of the ssds run through it, I think it would be interesting to run an hdd or two through it. It might take a week or two but it would encourage us who still have an hdd to get an ssd.
  • praftman - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - link

    Recently the MyDigitalSSD was reviewed and it was mentioned a 960GB varient was undergoing review. Here we see:

    "...the M500 is really the only game in town. ...a good, high-capacity SSD for notebook use and based on my options today, I'd have no issues going with the 960GB M500."

    ...So does that mean that the MyDigitalSSD 960GB is looking not up to par? At only $800 and with better Idle power consumption it was my first choice.

    Also, it is my understanding from the article that the lower Idle figures Micron claims are entirely dependent on these next-gen Haswell laptops and I should see no such difference from your reported ~1w with my 2012 MBP...correct?
  • praftman - Friday, April 12, 2013 - link

    ?
  • mayankleoboy1 - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - link

    in the Destroyer test, even with so many tasks, the average QD is ~5.5 .
    That means that for the average desktop usage, the QD is around 1. We need more tests that simulate such low QD usage.

    Also, I am curious why are you testing consumer SSD's with a workload that is atleast two orders of magnitude more intensive than what people actually use. Basically, you are testing a client SSD with a Server workload. I dont see what it tests.
    What is the use-case of testing such loads on a desktop SSD ?
  • Tjalve - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - link

    I agree. Thats why ive done some benchmarking of "real world scenarios". I actually recorded HDD activity from three diffrent people who use there computer for three entirley diffrent reasons. One beeing a gamer, one beeing one of the people at the office where I work (outlook, word, powerpoint,firefox) and the last one is recorded from a friend of mine who is a freelance video editor. So the last trace is based on him editing and compiling videos.
    http://www.nordichardware.se/SSD-Recensioner/svens...
    http://www.nordichardware.se/SSD-Recensioner/svens...
    http://www.nordichardware.se/SSD-Recensioner/svens...

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