Crucial M550 SSD (512GB) Review – Consistent Performance Never Looked So Good!

CRYSTAL DISK INFO 5.5.0

Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, to the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device.

As we can see above, CDI shows us that the drive is new, with zero power on hours and zero host writes, which is similar to how you would receive the drive fresh out of the box. We can also see that TRIM and SMART services are working correctly.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a relatively easy-to-use benchmark tool, which happens to be the benchmark of choice for many manufacturers. ATTO uses compressible data rather than random data, which results in higher performance and thus, higher benchmark scores. In our testing, we have selected the transfer size to range from 0.5KB to 8192KB, and have set the total length of the test to be 256MB.

Our first benchmark does not disappoint, as the Crucial M550 pumps out write speeds of up to 514MB/s and read speeds of up to 563MB/s. This is right in-line with the listed specifications, and quite impressive results for our first test.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0.3 x64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is visually straightforward, and is used for measuring the speeds at which your storage device reads and writes in both compressible (oFill/1Fill) and random, mostly incompressible, data. Random data is more consistent with everyday use of a computer, such as transferring videos, pictures and music. We ran the benchmark twice, using oFill data first, and then proceeding to test with random data, but the results returned with nearly identical scores, so we have only included the results for random data samples.

When testing in random (or highly incompressible) data, we see a drop in performance, which is just a little lower than we would like to see. As we know the performance of using incompressible data is expected to decrease when compared to compressible data.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER. 1.7

AS SSD Benchmark uses incompressible data in their testing of SSDs, essentially providing results that would be consistent with using the heaviest workload, thus lower speeds are expected. Transfer speeds (MB/s) are seen in the left picture below and IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) are the right.

AS SSD provides slightly better performance than Crystal DiskMark with both the sequential read and writes speeds increasing, as well as producing a total score of 1125. Another interesting feature of the AS SSD Benchmark is that it also can test sample durations and speeds of copying various files, this is an important test for our digital media professionals who require top transfer speeds.

The Crucial M550 SSD produces some great speeds for ISO and game copying, but lower than expected performance for program copy.