Crucial has many different NVME products and recently introduced another new product in the "T" series, apart from the top-of-the-line T700 series (Gen5), the T500 series that supports Gen4 NVME interface protocol and corresponding speeds up to 7GB/sec reading/writing. The Crucial T500 hosts the new Phison E25 controller along with Micron's 232L 3D TLC NAND and promises high reading/writing speeds, which is a good thing since Crucial now can catch up with the competition and at the same time offer competitive retail prices.

At the same time, due to the use of Phison's chipset, DirectStorage is onboard with Micron's LPDDR4 2GB DRAM at least for the 2TB variant we will test today. Of course, the new T500 series is compatible with PS5 consoles and comes in two variants, with or without a heatsink, depending on your needs and taste.

Both Intel and AMD systems are being supported as well. The drive has a mean time to failure (MTTF) rating of over 2 million hours, with over 1200TBW written to help ensure its longevity and reliability and 5 years of warranty.

Advanced Features

• Advanced Features
• Dynamic write acceleration
• Redundant array of independent NAND (RAIN)
• Multistep data integrity algorithms
• Adaptive thermal protection
• Integrated power loss immunity
• Active garbage collection
• TRIM support
• NVMe standard self monitoring and reporting technology (SMART)
• Error correction code (ECC)
• NVMe autonomous power state transition (APST) support
• Device sleep support
• Full-drive encryption capable (TCG OPAL 2.0)

- Specifications

- The Package/Overview

The Crucial T500 comes in the same design package, as we have seen with the T700 series. There are two models, with or without a passive heatsink. For sure all Gen4 drives do produce a lot of heat, so either get the non-heatsink model if you have a PC system or the heatsink model, if you plan to use it at a PS5 console for example.

The prices of the 2TB models are reduced at the time of writing this article, $124.99 (original price $179.99) for the heatsink version and $101.99 (original price $169.99) for the non-heatsink versions as noted on the Crucial USA website. Note that EU prices are much higher, probably reflect the original (not-discounted) prices of the product. The package design is the same for both drives and includes all needed information you might need.

The product is packaged securely, in a plastic shell and includes also a printed manual for both products

The product has typical dimensions for an M2 2280 NVME drive, while at the heatsink there is the Crucial T500 logo printed at the front, while at the back you will find all the needed information as serial number and firmware revision.

The no-heatsink model comes in small overall dimensions, again typical for an M2280 NVME SSD drive.

- Installation

Not much to be said here, just get the drive and plug it into an empty NVMe slot. In some boards you have to change Bios settings to Storage: PCIe in order to get the drive recognized. Before we start our tests, we can get some info for the drive via the Crucial Storage Executive software, the latest firmware has been already installed. Also, the Crucial drive is running at PCIE x4 speed.

Over the SMART tab, we can find more information.

The CrystalDiskInfo software gives us more details:

while the expected free space after formatting the drive under Windows 11 is around 1.81TB of space.