Crucial M550 Series Solid State Drive Review

Name: Crucial M550 Series Solid State Drive Review
Brand: Crucial

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, March 18, 2014, 09:00 AM EDT

Performance Summary: We can’t speak to the lower-capacity drives in the series, but the Crucial M550 1TB and 512GB 2.5” drives we tested here offered strong performance, virtually across the board. The drives performed particularly well with 4K transfers, especially at higher queue depths. Sequential reads and writes were also among the best we’ve seen in a variety of tests, access times were very good, and performance remained consistent regardless of the compressibility of data being transferred.

The Crucial M550 Series Solid State Drives In Various Form Factors,
Find Them At Amazon.Com

The Crucial M550 series may be somewhat of an evolution of the manufacturer’s M500 series of solid state drives which were released last year, but that doesn’t make them any less attractive in our opinion. The drives use a controller that has proven to be reliable and overall performance is very good in light of competing drives.

Crucial has set the MSRPs for the 128GB M550 at $99, the 256GB drive at $168.9, the 512GB drive at $336.99, and the 1TB model at $530.99. Though we expect street prices to drift downward once availability ramps up, even at those MSRPs the M550 series falls squarely into affordable territory. The lower capacity drives aren’t quite as attractive in terms of cost per GB (at roughly $0.67 - $0.77 per GB), but the higher capacity drives, like the 1TB model which is only about $0.52 per GB, are competitively priced, especially considering their performance.

Our experience with the Crucial M550 512GB and 1TB drives was very good and we think they’ll serve users well. If you’re in the market for a solid state drive, the Crucial M550 series should absolutely be on your short-list of potential candidates.


Strong Performance Competitive Pricing	Minimal Bundle (no mounting adapter or cloning software)

Tags: Intel, SSD, Micron, Storage, NAND, MLC, SATA, Crucial, M550

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com