Crucial T500 Gen4 NVMe SSD: New Flagship Melds Micron 232L 3D TLC and Phison E25
by Ganesh T S on October 31, 2023 9:00 AM EST
Crucial is unveiling its latest addition to its Gen4 consumer NVMe SSD lineup today - the T500 PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD. It takes over flagship duties from the Crucial P5 Plus in this category. The company had started to put focus on the high-end consumer SSD segment earlier this year with the launch of the T700 Gen5 NVMe SSD - it was one of the first to offer more than 12 GBps read speeds. The company is now introducing a T-series drive in the Gen4 segment with similar flagship credentials - sequential read and write speeds of 7400 / 7000 MBps.
The Crucial T500 is one of the first consumer SSDs to utilize the Phison E25 controller launched last year. The Micron 232L 3D TLC NAND in the SSD has been in mass production for a few quarters now, allowing the company to price the product competitively. Similar to the T700, this drive is targeted towards gamers, content creators, and professional users. While PCIe 5.0 SSDs are slowly getting introduced into the market, Gen4 units are still a sweet spot in terms of system compatibility, price, and performance for many use-cases.
The T500 is launching in three capacities and two variants - a heatsink and non-heatsink one. The 500GB version comes in a non-heatsink SKU only, while the 1TB and 2TB ones come in both variants. Crucial is promising a 4TB version next year. The company indicated that the heatsink SKUs is low-profile enough to be be used in the PlayStation 5.
Phison has been pushing DirectStorage optimizations in its high-end controllers, and it is no surprise that the T500 advertises the use of Phison's 'I/O+ Technology' to appeal to gamers. Given its high-performance nature, it is no surprise that the E25 controller needs to be equipped with DRAM for managing the flash translation layer (FTL). Crucial is using Micron LPDDR4 DRAM (1GB / TB of flash) in the T500 for this purpose.
| Crucial T500 Gen4 NVMe SSD Specifications | ||||
| Capacity | 500 GB | 1 TB | 2 TB | |
| Controller | Phison PS5025-E25 | |||
| NAND Flash | Micron 232L 3D TLC NAND | |||
| Form-Factor, Interface | Single-Sided M.2-2280, PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe 2.0 | |||
| Sequential Read | 7200 MB/s | 7300 MB/s | 7400 MB/s | |
| Sequential Write | 5700 MB/s | 6800 MB/s | 7050 MB/s | |
| Random Read IOPS | 800K | 1150K | 1180K | |
| Random Write IOPS | 300K | 600K | 1200K | |
| SLC Caching | Static / Dynamic (up to 20% of user capacity) | |||
| TCG Opal Encryption | Yes | |||
| Warranty | 5 years | |||
| Write Endurance | 300 TBW 0.33 DWPD |
600 TBW 0.33 DWPD |
1200 TBW 0.33 DWPD |
|
| MSRP | $90 (18¢/GB) | $120 (Non-Heatsink) (12¢/GB) $130 (Heatsink) (13¢/GB) |
$170 (Non-Heatsink) (8.5¢/GB) $180 (Heatsink) (9¢/GB) |
|
Flash pricing is quite low, with the memory industry being caught up in one of its downturns currently. While this has not been kind to the revenue numbers for the NAND flash / DRAM vendors, it has translated to excellent launch pricing for even flagship SSDs such as the Crucial T500 - starting from as low as 8.5¢/GB for the 2TB non-heatsink SKU.
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systemBuilder33 - Wednesday, November 15, 2023 - link
Check out the YouTube benchmarks of PCIe 3, 4, and 5 drives. Time to download a large file (like a game level loading) - 27, 25, 24 seconds respectively. PCIe 5 is really not useful yet to anyone.qap - Wednesday, November 1, 2023 - link
Are there any 8TB+ consumer grade SSDs on the horizon? Memory prices are low enough for such products to make perfect sense, but you can count all of them on a single hand. And only single one I know of is intended for M2 slot (and is seriously overpriced for the capacity). Where are ~400EUR/USD 8TB M2 drives?Jansen - Wednesday, November 1, 2023 - link
Unfortunately the market for them is still relatively small. At that price point, cost becomes prohibitive for many, so they end up going for HDDs. Sabrent is the only company that has consistently invested in that capacity, and they’ve had issues because of the specific NAND they’ve had to use.8TB SSD support for the PS5 is actually a high driver for change, and we might see more competition. However, not everyone wants to pay for storage that costs more than their console. I’m using 8TB SSDs for PS5 internal and external storage, though I’m highly abnormal in that regard.
TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, November 1, 2023 - link
Crucial and sabrent both have them.systemBuilder33 - Wednesday, November 15, 2023 - link
Crucial refuses to sell a 4TB PCIe4 flash drive. We bought an Acer Predator GM700 4TB drive and I just verified it last weekend. It has Crucial TLC but it actually has a good endurance warranty, the Crucial endurance warranties are at the bottom of the industry! That does not speak well of Crucial since they are making the chips themselves!PeachNCream - Wednesday, November 1, 2023 - link
I see the individual cell P/E cycle endurance for TLC is still a positively underwhelming 600. Thanks NAND for that wonderful lack of technological advancement. /sarcasmballsystemlord - Wednesday, November 1, 2023 - link
The endurance really has dropped on these TLC crucial products over the years. Their 1TB SSD, the MP510, had 1700TBW. Now even their 2TB drive doesn't even have that much endurance.hydrocryo01 - Thursday, November 2, 2023 - link
Why's the endurance rating even lower than some DRAM-less ssds with MAP1602+YMTC232L combination?Also, the rated random iops is lower than SK Hynix Platinum P41 (or Solidigm P44 Pro). And Phison E25 is probably targeting more performance instead of better efficiency. And SK Hynix achieved that on a 4-channel controller and 1600MT/s flash.
Diogene7 - Tuesday, November 14, 2023 - link
The problem really is although since 2000 NAND Flash memory served us well, and is a big improvement over Hard Disk Drive (HDD), it is a high power consumption storage, non byte addressable, low endurance (10E6) and high latency (microsecond) read/write access compared to many new emerging Non-Volatile-Memory (NVM) like for example MRAM (especially SOT-MRAM, VG-SOT-MRAM,…).But as of 2023, as NAND Flash has become reasonably cheap and continue to get cheaper, there is no financial incentive for Samsung, Sk Hynix, Micron,… to significantly allocate resources to scale-up manufacturing of new emerging NVM like MRAM that can be more power efficient, lower latency (nanosecond), higher endurance (10E12), byte addressable,…
Some further breakthrough and financial incentive would be badly needed because MRAM and spintronics related technologies (ex: Intel MESO concept,…) are likely what is TRULY to get much, much, much better power efficiency (1000x+), lower latency (1000x+),…
It is what the US Chips act should have been used for: kickstart the next evolution in semiconductor manufacturing by helping scaling up spintronics related technologies (MRAM,…) to have the US retake their leadership…
The Dane - Tuesday, January 16, 2024 - link
Are you sure the drive supports the TCG Opal 2.0 Hardware Encryption? Where do you have this information from? I have tried to use the T500 controller hardware encryption with BitLocker but it is not supported. It can only do software encryption.