Crucial MX500 500GB and 1TB SATA SSD Reviews
Anvil Storage Utilities
Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0
Along with the move to a new platform, we decided to make a change in one of the benchmarks. There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 1, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.
Anvil SSD Benchmark with 100% Compression (incompressible data):
Benchmark Results: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) the Crucial MX500 500GB drive was able to achieve a score of 4,886 points and the 1TB drive came in slightly behind that with 4,813 points. Basically the same performance and that is what we expected from the same drive series.
Anvil SSD Applications Benchmark at 46% Compression:
Benchmark Results: With the compression at 46% to help mimic real world applications better we found the overall score improved to roughly 4,900 points.
Benchmark Results: We used Anvil to check the 4K Random Read performance and found we topped out at around 99,000 IOPS using the 46% compression preset that best matches typical applications. Crucial specifications show this drive as having a maximum 4K Random Read IOPS of up to 95K at QD32, so we are right where we should be in terms of performance. Low queue depth performance was exception with the second highest QD1 speeds we’ve seen from any SATA drive series.
Benchmark Results: When it came to 4K Random Write performance, the Crucial MX500 drives topped out at around 88,000 IOPS at QD32 and that is close enough for us to the drives 90K rating. The QD1 thru QD3 4K Random Write Performance was on par with other big name drives although the QD4 performance did take a little performance hit.