Micron’s Crucial brand has discontinued production of its popular MX500 series SSDs. SSDs of this series were produced for almost 7 years and were extremely popular among users. The devices were offered in 2.5-inch and M.2 2280 form factors, in both cases with a SATA III interface.
Image source: Crucial
Crucial MX500 drives have continued to be highly popular over recent years due to their extremely low cost per GB of space and reasonable levels of performance. However, the market did not stand still. Cheap NVMe solid-state drives based on 3D QLC NAND flash memory have appeared, the number of M.2 NVMe slots on modern motherboards has increased, and the number of SATA III ports has decreased. All this apparently forced Crucial to decide to discontinue production of the MX500 series of SSDs.
Crucial MX500 drives are still available in versions up to 4 TB. However, their cost is comparable to more powerful NVMe drives of the PCIe 3.0 and even PCIe 4.0 standard based on QLC NAND flash memory. For example, Crucial P3 Plus. Moreover, the cost of a 4TB P3 Plus drive is now lower than the price of an MX500 of the same capacity, but with significantly lower performance.