 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the M500 SSD from Crucial. Now this one's gonna be pretty short because it's another SSD, so there's not a whole lot to say about it with respect to like, well, it's got great cable management and you know, the widgets are optimized for the thing, whatever else. So basically this is using Micron's latest 20 nanometer flash. So if you guys don't know this already, Micron is Crucial's parent company. It comes with a three-year warranty. This is the first major iteration that they've made to their SSD lineup since the M4 on the consumer side anyway. So the M4 has been an awesome SSD. Part of what gives me a lot of confidence recommending Crucial SSDs is the fact that the M4 was so well supported. They found firmware bugs before it ever actually became a problem with people's drives that were actually deployed in the field. So there was one where the drive would just stop working after X number of hours. Their lab was still working on QA and testing and found it before it ever became a problem. So that kind of stuff is really, really, really good to see. The drive itself is slim, so it'll fit in a 7 millimeter, 2.5 inch enclosure, or it comes with a spacer on it so you can go ahead and add an extra 2 millimeters to it so it'll fit in a standard 9 millimeter spot. So I guess you put that on the bottom or the top or it's up to you. I don't really know. Oh, yeah, you put that on here on the top. You got a simple label here, you've got some mounting holes, you've got their like super like 80s looking packaging. I really liked the old packaging for their drives better than this. This is cool. So they've added a couple things. So they've added hardware data encryption, which is becoming a more important feature. Basically what that does is it's a BIOS level lock. So you have to enter a password just to boot up the computer and have access to the drive that just keeps your data more safe. Adaptive thermal protection has also been added. It's got a three year warranty still. The thing about crucial drives is that unlike San Force based drives, which I mean Intel's using, lots of companies are using, it is not dependent on the data being compressible. So you're able to do up to 500 megabytes per second reads, 400 megabytes per second writes, and that is regardless of the type of data. And this particular drive is good for up to about 80,000 IOPS on the high end of the capacity. So as drives scaling capacity, the performance does tend to go up. And that is one of the things that's most exceptional about the M500. It is available in a 960 gig capacity for a price of around $600, making it the most reasonably priced terabyte class drive available. Now this one right here is 128 gigs. So you can get 128, 256, 512, or this 960. Sorry, was it 120? Sorry, 120, 240. Brain fart there, 240 times 2 is 480. Ultimately, I could have done 960 divided by 2 is 480. So 480 or 960 gigs. Now the pricing scales in sort of a weird fashion with, I mean in the past, it used to be that the high capacity drives carried a price premium in terms of dollars per gig over the lower end ones. But with the M500, it actually scales downwards in terms of price per gig as you go to a greater capacity. So you can see what Crucial is doing here is they're really pushing the adoption of SSDs as a high capacity storage, which is extremely exciting. So there you go, guys. If you wanted to drop 600 bucks on an SSD tomorrow, it would be pretty hard for me to not recommend the 1 terabyte M500. You can actually store all your data on it. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.