The new T500 2TB mainstream drive from Crucial does integrate a Phison PS5025-E25 controller, 2GB of DDR4-4266 for caching the mapping tables but also two Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND modules and is able to sustained a good transfer rate unless the pSLC caching is fully filled. Considering we are talking about TLC NAND, we were surprised to see write rates under 100MB/s, but we need to say in the drive’s favor that this scenario happened after only writing over 690GB, so this should not be taken into account as a negative for most users.

In the HD Tune Writes workload, we could note the intermediary phase the drive passes through before writing directly to the TLC:

In terms of temperatures, the preinstalled heatsink does a really good job, not allowing the drive to throttle, while the low height permits installation in PS5 consoles as well.

For the 2TB model, the durability is good with a rating of 1200TBW, while the drive is also backed by a 5-year warranty.

The T500 is a bit more expensive versus drives based on Maxiotech MAP1602A + YMTC 232-layer NAND which usually integrate much less SLC cache, at about 175 Euros.

Crucial T500 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD with Heatsink is Recommended for:

We would like to thank again to Crucial for making this review possible!