CRUCIAL STORAGE EXECUTIVE

If you need more control over your MX500 you can always download Crucial’s Storage Executive software from their website.

The very first screen shows the available physical (obviously just in case you wish to use their momentum cache technology) and virtual system memory and the drive’s serial number, installed firmware version, used capacity and temperature (unfortunately just like in a past review the software crashed under Windows 10 Pro so this time over in order to feature it in our review we had to boot the system using a Windows 7 Ultimate installation).

You can also perform an online firmware search for the drive but to date Crucial hasn’t released an update for the MX500.

The status of the drive can be checked from both the health (easier and faster) and SMART tabs (more detailed).

If you need to securely delete everything on the drive the sanitize drive tab offers that option with ease.

Momentum cache uses a small amount of system memory (RAM) to store data prior to moving them to the SSD’s flash memory. Since RAM is faster that should improve performance but since the amount of RAM used is not large (unless you have 128GB or more installed in your system) you’re practically getting a small but rather short-lived boost.

Via the Over Provisioning tab you can allocate a percentage of the drive (an small amount is pre-allocated but you can increase it significantly from here) to improve system performance and endurance (unfortunately since the flex capacity option is not supported on the MX500 we can’t really comment on it).