CRUCIAL STORAGE EXECUTIVE

If you need more control over your BX500 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.

You can check the current temperature and drive usage from the drive details tab.

Detailed drive status can be checked from the SMART tab.

You can also perform an online firmware search for the drive but to date Crucial hasn’t released an update for the BX500.

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

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 (a small amount is pre-allocated but you can increase it significantly from here) to improve system performance and endurance (unfortunately since the flex capacity and device self-test options are not supported on the BX500 we can’t talk about them).