Crucial M500 1TB SSD launched at low price

If there’s been one thing holding people back from upgrading to an SSD it’s the cost of high-capacity drives. After CES 2013 that could change with the Crucial M500 SSD.

Available for less than $600 (around £370) for the 960GB version, the M500 should be around 40 per cent cheaper than existing 1TB SSDs. While it’s still more expensive than a hard disk, it ably demonstrates the rapidly declining costs of SSDs. There will also be 120GB, 240GB and 480GB models available, so you can balance storage space against budget.

In fact, Crucial told us that the price drop on SSDs is one of the main factors why it’s not releasing a successor to its Crucial Adrenaline hard disk cache. If you’re not familiar with the product, it uses an SSD to cache the most commonly accessed files, while leaving all of your storage on an existing hard disk.

As well as a price drop, the company is promising that the Crucial M500 will have top performance. All models are rated at a 500MB/s read speed, but write speeds differ: the 960GB and 480GB models have a 400MB/s write speed, the 240GB mode has a write speed of 250MB/s and the 120GB a write speed of 130MB/s.

Other new features include a Thermistor to monitor the temperature of the drive and manage reads and writes if it’s overheating, and capacitors that keep the drive powered long enough to finish writing data should the PC be shutdown too quickly.

The drive will be available in three form factors: 2.5in SATA for regular PCs and laptops, and for motherboards and small form factor PCs and laptops mSATA and the new M.2. The only restriction is that the 960GB version is only available in a 2.5in form factor.

All drives will be available under the Crucial brand for consumers and under the Micron brand for system builders. Specifications and performance remain the same for both brands. The Crucial M500 will be available shortly and we’ll have UK pricing soon.