“Simply the best OEM SSD ever made”: Micron’s new SSD gets glowing reviews thanks to new controller and new NAND — Expect it to come to a workstation PC near you
Micron's 3500 1TB SSD could be one of them best SSDs ever made – if not the best – with a score of 100% TweakTown and winning the coveted Editor's Choice Award.
Launching in December 2023, this 232-layer NAND SSD has an M.2 2280 form factor, comes in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB variants and features an excellent Phison E25 controller that can also be found in the Crucial T500 SSD.
The controller built into the M3500 also features four-channel PICe Gen4 connectivity, which makes it notable given its stellar performance when paired with eight-channel alternatives.
'An absolute masterpiece of engineering'
Crucially, Micron's retail arm is, for reference, while Micron builds the SSDs for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). The Crucial T500 and Micron 3500 differ slightly in that the latter is specifically configured to be sold with certain hardware units, such as those you'd find in our reviews of the best PCs or the best workstations.
According to the manufacturer, the Micron 3500 SSD offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s respectively, with tests with CystalDiskMark confirming these figures.
It performs incredibly well across a wide range of benchmarks – from computing to gaming – and, most importantly, this OEM SSD does not perform significantly worse compared to its retail version – the Crucial T500. In fact, it's on par in almost all benchmarks, despite being somewhat limited to meet OEM requirements.
In fact, it's so powerful that it beats almost any eight-channel PCIe Gen4 SSD, with only the Samsung 990 Pro able to beat it when configured to run at full power.
Ultimately, TweakTown heralds the device as “an absolute engineering masterpiece,” adding, “Being able to beat 99.99% of all 8-channel controlled PCIe Gen4 SSDs with half the channels is by far the most impressive achievement that we have ever seen from an SSD at any time.”