Crucial BX500 1TB 2.5" SSD for $69.85 Delivered @ Amazon US via AU

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AAA-A on 14/05/2023 - 19:23 amazon.com.au (280 clicks)
Last edited 15/05/2023 - 11:57 by 2 other users

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Crucial BX500 1TB 2.5" SSD, CT1000BX500SSD1, Black down to $69/85 which appears to be the lowest on Amazon accoridng to CamelCamelCamel.

Prices continue to drop on SSDs which is great to see.

About this item

• Boot up faster. Load files quicker. Improve overall system responsiveness
• 300% faster than a typical Hard drive
• Improves battery life because it's 45x more energy efficient than a typical Hard drive
• Micron 3D NAND – advancing the world's Memory and storage technology for 40 years

2TB Version now $149.00 @ Amazon AU

Price History at CamelCamelCamel.

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• 

  bliz on 14/05/2023 - 21:02

  absolute junk speeds don't bother

  • 

    kehuehue on 14/05/2023 - 21:56

    Not even as game drive?

    • 

      xmagic on 14/05/2023 - 22:14

      At this price point you can go budget NVMe already. Better in EVERY way.

      • 

        Erwark on 14/05/2023 - 23:00

        +5

        Unless you don't have NVMe or a spare slot/lane.

        But if you need SATA, probably better with the MX500 for $12 more, due to Dram cache helping sustained read/write.

        • 

          CascadeHush on 15/05/2023 - 00:09

          +1

          @Erwark: I’m not sure how true that is. Once the cache is full you are back to whatever the media can do.

          I have an MX and a BX in the same machine. Performance difference is basically a rounding error, unless you are writing a lot of very small files.

          Either is still way better than spinning rust.

          Still, for $12 I’d get the MX anyway.

          • 

            Erwark on 15/05/2023 - 07:18

            @CascadeHush: Yep, it's not an enormous difference, but probably worth $12, esp if OS Drive.

            By the way people talk, you'd think a Dram-less SSD with <1000 TBW will lose to a HDD and then spontaneously combust.

            • 

              DmytroP on 15/05/2023 - 08:03

              +1

              @Erwark: When copying data from HDD to QVO Samsung, the bottleneck was actually the SSD, the write speed was about 2-2.5x lower than the HDD.

              • 

                Erwark on 15/05/2023 - 09:37

                @DmytroP: Wow, I had a look and reviews say the QVO drives slow to <100MB/s after 84GB of sequential writes. So that's a fairly niche case in daily usage, but definitely not a great look…

                • 

                  netsurfer on 15/05/2023 - 12:03

                  @Erwark: If you don't actually own a QLC SSD, especially not a low end QLC SSD, it is best not to assume QLC SSDs behave the same way as TLC, especially after SLC cache is used up. They are quite painful and can be slower than HDD.

                  BX500 vs MX500. Once again, depends on model, but even with BX500 TLC version way back, unless you stayed within the SLC cache portion all the time (i.e. light write usage), the write performance of BX500 for large amount of data is far inferior. Sure, for reads, most people probably cannot tell the difference in general light usage.

                  If it is a fresh new gaming drive with the intention to download every game you own from cloud, then you won't feel the pain of BX500 QLC version. If you intend to copy your current steam collection across and is close to 1TB, you will feel the ugly side of QLC. However, if you can tolerate that once off pain, BX500 is still acceptable as a cheap gaming SSD.

                  • 

                    CascadeHush on 15/05/2023 - 12:11

                    @netsurfer: For most of it's life, my BX500 was my steam drive, and for most games it doesn't seem any slower than my internal NVMe drive. Or to put it another way, I was a bit disappointed that moving games from my BX to my boot NVMe didn't yield any perceptible decrease in load times for games.

                    So I guess I'm assuming people are using these as secondary drives, not boot drives, to store games or media. That purpose the BX and MX are not going to be a lot different.

                    • 

                      netsurfer on 15/05/2023 - 12:30

                      +2

                      @CascadeHush: Because the situations you are talking about have BX500 doing reads. That's why kekhuekhue hinted it is okay for a gaming SSD.

                      Quoting Tom's Hardware:

                      After 48GB of data written, performance degrades to a write speed of 85MB/s.

                      By the way, that's the TLC version of BX500 960GB. I do have an old BX500 that's TLC based. However, unless your BX500 is QLC version and you actually used it to write a large amount of data in one go and very happy about it, it is best not to overhype BX500. We know QLC SSDs can be a cost effective solution, but at this price point, you can get NVMe 1TB SSD that's TLC based and perform a lot better than BX500. The 2TB price is also subpar compared to NVMe offering.

• 

  Godgodgod on 15/05/2023 - 10:22

  One thing I have noticed with the cheap ssds like this on and other nvmes is the write speeds just crawls once certain data is transferred. you can see this under windows task manager.

  A work around is to pause transfer once disk utilisation is 100%, if the program allows for it and then resume in 2 seconds. I did that with steam local game transfer as I am migrating to a new machine. A 36 GB game took 32 minutes if left on its own and another 35gb game took 3 minutes with pause play trick.

  • 

    CascadeHush on 15/05/2023 - 10:30

    Okay, it makes sense that once the cache is full it would slow down, but why allowing the cache time to empty would make such a dramatic difference in total transfer time is beyond me.

    Maybe one or both drives was overheating and allowing them time to cool down also helped performance. Or maybe there is something janky with the OS drive cache and allowing that time to fill provided some optimisation. Just because the program stopped copying, does not necessarily mean the OS wasn't doing some work in anticipation of the up coming read/writes.

    Or maybe you found a bug in the matrix.

    • 

      netsurfer on 15/05/2023 - 11:56

      No, you are basing your experience on TLC SSDs. Low cost QLC SSDs do and can have shockingly bad writes during folding write mode. Low cost QLC SSDs simply have terrible write speed when it also needs to re-write data previously written in SLC mode.

      Furthermore, the firmware is dumb and cannot assume you only intend to write another 35GB of data. It assumes you could be writing a lot of data to fill the whole drive.

      It's not a bug in the matrix. It's simply dodgy SSD makers saving cost and low end SSD controller is hopeless at managing QLC, and limited controller channels further adds insult to injury. If the SSD makers moved to QLC to save cost, there is no chance the SSD makers upgrade the SSD controller. What was suggested does work for low end / cheapo QLC SSDs because when you don't write files to the SSD while it is doing SLC cache to QLC recovery, the SSD can complete the task much faster.

      • 

        CascadeHush on 15/05/2023 - 12:04

        Thanks :)

        Hopeless indeed, apparently.

        Still seems like something the OS could manage better, if holding off writes for 2 seconds periodically yields literally an order of magnitude better performance. But then that would require Microsoft to care about the quality of their operating system, which clearly they do not.

        • 

          netsurfer on 15/05/2023 - 12:08

          @CascadeHush: No, it is a hardware issue and cost cutting to the bone issue. QLC optimisation can really only start at 2TB and the write amplification is still bad even if you use the delay trick. It's has exactly the same issue on Mac so don't blame the OS. There are okay-ish QLC SSDs, but they are 2TB or larger.

          Wait 2 seconds won't help. Honestly, if you don't own a low end QLC SSD, it is best not to assume or try to come up with half baked solutions. Try to spread out the writes or just go out and have a meal when you are doing a full drive clone on a low cost QLC SSD. Once done, in general mostly reads usage, QLC is still quite usable.

          • 

            CascadeHush on 15/05/2023 - 12:21

            @netsurfer: I wasn't blaming the OS, only that it could do better. If the originator of this thread could improve the performance by so much for such a small change, that the OS could do that better than the user could.

            Your argument is was that hardware is crap, but also that the software is crap. I mentioned based on facts stated in this thread, that the software side could be better, and your counterargument is that the hardware is crap. So then why mention the firmware at all. Also MacOS is as crap as WIndows apparently, but then it's no secret that Apple don't care about optimizing third party hardware.

            I'm really not sure what your point is. We accept that the underlying hardware is cheap for a reason and that we are getting more storage with less performance for a lower price. The point of this tread was that that performance could be improved with a user intervention, and my point was that that intervention could be implemented in software. That could be done at the firmware level, or the OS level, or both. Seems like neither party is interested in that.

            • 

              netsurfer on 15/05/2023 - 12:44

              @CascadeHush: You don't know the tech behind it. You expect OS to ask SSD to run SLC to QLC recovery immediately? Let me put it plainly, even if you use linux, the issue remains there. Of course firmware is relevant. That's the bit which decides SLC to QLC recovery has to take place. It's the firmware that decides heavy SLC dynamic cache being employed by QLC SSDs (that's the norm) vs some TLC SSD firmwares use less aggressive SLC cache to delay the folding write (so if the customer ended up not writing that much data, it has some idle time later on to do the folding write in background). QLC SSDs simply don't have that luxury.

              First, you need to prove you have a QLC SSD and you have written more than 300GB of data in one go. Going back to the beginning of this thread conversation, the guy was offering a workaround for QLC SSDs. You then went cynical mode and teased it is a bug in the matrix. After that, blaming OS and software.

              While I understand QLC SSDs have their uses, the main issue is SSD makers cut cost too much on low end QLC SSDs. Sure, due to competition, that's understandable, but fundamentally, the issue with QLC remains and the main problem is price. It has not delivered the needed cost saving to justify its poor folding write. Most people don't even think about write amplification issue (that's IMPOSSIBLE to fix in software because it is fundamental hardware SLC cache cheating penalty, TLC has that issue too, just generally not as bad).

              If we can get TLC NVMe SSD at this price (actually lower than this price), it is just hard to get excited about SATA QLC SSD.

            • 

              netsurfer on 15/05/2023 - 13:03

              @CascadeHush: Don't get me wrong, before I started actually using QLC SSDs, I was in a similar position. QLC SSDs' read speed is still good and they are fine for gaming. How bad can the write be? However, once I started using them, they do have issues, especially on write consistency.

              They have very aggressive SLC recovery (that has to happen) but even when that happens, the writes can be inconsistent. They are usable, but just annoying. I get writes where a large file is writing at 400MB/s (SATA), then drops to 30MB/s and goes up to 400MB/s briefly then drops by to 30MB/s. Running benchmarks can also yield very weird results at times. Sure, reads, quite alright. But in today's usage, it does feel a bit annoying and I question its quality of life improvement on writes. I did a full drive write test on the QLC SSD, 3.8 hours (vs TLC equivalent size SSD of 35 minutes, and that's a cheapo TLC not flagship). 3.8 hours full drive write is worse than HDD of the same size. The full drive write is using a software (so it writes large files, not small files) so we are talking about "best" case full drive clone speed.

              • 

                Godgodgod on 15/05/2023 - 19:19

                @netsurfer: Interesting comments y'all. My data drive is WD blue sn570. Yes cheapest when I bought it (1tb $79) drive, not sure what it is but my trick works. I transferred a total of 250gb with this trick in no time

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  BillyBlaze on 15/05/2023 - 14:32

  Perfect for new original XBOX hdd

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  sats on 17/05/2023 - 13:20

  Its showing as $77.95