mSATA SSD Review: Crucial 480GB M500 vs Samsung 1TB 840 EVO

We took a closer look at both the Crucial 480GB M500 and Samsung 1TB 840 EVO to find out which of these pint-sized mSATA SSDs you should purchase for your next laptop upgrade.

Read the full content of this Article: http://www.notebookreview.com/review/msata-ssd-review-crucial-480gb-m500-vs-samsung-1tb-840-evo/

 

Oh, wow. This is awesome. Thank you for this; I was actually looking into getting either of these. The 1 TB may be overkill, but I'm really a hardware fanatic, so I might be tempted to get it. Crucial is still a great option, and the price for the 480GB is more than fair.

 

If you don't need the capacity of the 1TB Samsung then I would expect the 500GB version to have most, if not all, of the performance and share the same power characteristics.

However, the general wisdom is that SSDs benefit from having some unused space (called "over-provisioning") to help with garbage management and maintenance of performance. Samsung's white paper here implies that the built-in over-provisioning is sufficient but I've left about 10% of my 1TB unpartitioned as some extra unused space.

John

 

Interesting review. Well done!

 

Crucial recently updated the M500 firmware to version MU05.

To see if the new firmware improved the idle power consumption I temporarily put the M500 mSATA back into my Samsung NP900X4C (the Samsung EVO is normally occupying the slot) so I could update the firmware and rerun my power test.

The result is that the idle power drain or temperature is no lower (in fact slightly higher) so I don't think the firmware update has made any major change in that respect. i should note that his is with Ivy Bridge and Windows 7. It's possible that behaviour with Haswell + Windows 8 would be better.

John

 

Hi John,

Thanks for your review on the msata evo 1TB
I have a couple of questions:
1 -What BIOS is on your NP900X4C?
The reason I ask is my NP900X4C and NP900X4B do not recognize the 1 tb drive in BIOS version P10AAH
I have 2 of the msata drive and both are not recognized; however, the do work fine with a USB adpter, so the drives are fine.
I have really been scratching my head how you got your unit to recognize the 1tb drive.
Any help is appreciated.

Thanks
Rick

 

I'm running this with P07AAC (the AAC BIOS family is for the Windows 7 X4Cs). I'm a bit surprised that you have an AAH BIOS. My Windows 8 X4C has an ABK BIOS (but I haven't tried the EVO SSD in it).

I didn't consciously do anything special: First I had installed Windows 7 on the Crucial M500 then cloned that onto the EVO 1TB. I haven't got UEFI enabled. If you haven't tried it already then try cloning your existing SSD onto the new one.

I would suggest we continue this discussion in this thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/672173-series-9-owners-third-party-msata-upgrades.html.

John