Is the Micron M500 a good deal?

[jaydee]

You can currently find the Micron M500 480GB drive (new w/3 year warranty) for $105-110 on Amazon and Newegg. I know it's about 3 years old, but it's by far the cheapest MLC drive in that capacity and while it's not as fast as the latest and greatest, its seems to be a very good deal all things considered. Meaning, benchmarks aside, there's not going to be a lot of difference found in performance. I can't find many complaints about the drive online either, am I missing something? Is there a better deal out there right now?

 

[birthdaymonkey]

Looks like Newegg recently got a bunch of refurb/OEM M500 drives. I bought a refurb one in Canada last week for $110 CAD (480GB), which works out to $85 US, though it only has a 180 day warranty... the SMART data for my drive showed 51MB written and 5 days power-on time. I was pretty pleased with the deal! The Amazon $110 with three years warranty sounds pretty good to me.

For everyday workloads the M500 should perform the same as other modern mainstream SSDs. The only possible drawback is that initial reviews of the consumer (Crucial) version showed high idle power consumption.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

M500s were widely recommended at the time. They are slower than the followups (M550, BX100, and the Samsung 840/850 series). But for client workloads you'll never notice the difference unless you benchmarked it.

I'd worry about buying a used/refurb one just like I'd worry about buying anything used. (You don't know what it's been through.) But you could do a lot worse, and the price is right!

 

[nanaki333]

Like others said, I got a few of them during a huge sale and use them in work PCs. The end-users are very happy and ask if they can bring in their PC and put an SSD in. It's still so cute how users go from an HDD to SSD and think it's just not possible a system can be THAT fast.

Most all SSDs are going to be snappy for you, even most TLC. Unless you're going to just benchmark, the M500 is going to treat you great and won't *feel* much (if any) different than a Samsung 850 Pro in day to day usage.

 

[jaydee]

Like others said, I got a few of them during a huge sale and use them in work PCs. The end-users are very happy and ask if they can bring in their PC and put an SSD in. It's still so cute how users go from an HDD to SSD and think it's just not possible a system can be THAT fast.

Most all SSDs are going to be snappy for you, even most TLC. Unless you're going to just benchmark, the M500 is going to treat you great and won't *feel* much (if any) different than a Samsung 850 Pro in day to day usage.

Speed will be nice, but I'm actually just looking to replace a 750GB HDD in my main system, I've already have 120GB Samsung 830 Pro that I don't have intentions of replacing anytime soon. I'm always nervous about the 750GB HDD (~3-4 year old WD Green I think?) failing and feel better about an SSD because in my mind it's not as likely to fail over time because it has no spinning parts (valid?). Want to avoid TLC because I will most likely keep the 480GB mostly full (80-90%) do big file copies and my understanding is TLC real dogs down in those scenarios. Overall though I'm more concerned about reliability than performance.

I'm in that zone where I kinda care about what's on the (750GB HDD) drive, but not a ton. I have 1 TB WHS 2011 server running RAID 1 (Samsung F3's I've had for 4 years and I bought them second hand) with the real important stuff, and this secondary drive just hosts a lot of documentaries and sports games that I record. I don't want to lose stuff on there, but I guess not enough to go through the hassle (and cost) of increasing the storage of my server. The recordings I really don't want to go *poof* does get backed up. Maybe a year from now or so I'll ditch the WHS and go for a 3TB NAS or something like that and set myself for a long time, but I'm not quite ready to do that. I'm secretly hoping that large capacity SSD drops down enough in price where it's actually feasible to use 3TB in a NAS, but I realize we're probably more than a year away.

 

[nanaki333]

I feel ya man. I have a 1TB raptor that still sports a lot of files I don't want to lose too that's probably about the same age. I have my Desktop and Documents pointed to the raptor and sync'd to my server on a RAID6 array.

The high capacity are still stupid expensive. The 1TB Sammy's and equivalent are like ~$230 but the 2TB Sammy is almost 3x the cost. That's why I just got another 1TB to expand my games/apps array for cheaper.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I didn't know M500 drives were available new any more. I see Newegg carrying refurbs, which aren't so bad, but their prices on the refurbs are higher than I think that they should be.

I like the M500 drives. They've always been pretty reliable for me, and performance is decent, even if not best-of-class.

I do put the M500, M550, and Intel 320 and 710 and 730 in a special category, though, because all of those drives have power back-up caps. I think that's a worthwhile feature to aim for, if you can afford them, and value reliability over pure performance.