"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

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By Keumars Afifi-Sabet
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Micron's 3500 1TB SSD is a four-channel PCIe Gen4 SSD that is faster than "99.9%" of its eight-channel rivals

Micron 3500 SSD
(Image credit: Micron)

Micron's 3500 1TB SSD might just be among the best SSDs ever made – if not the best – having scored 100% on TweakTown and winning its highly coveted Editor's Choice Award.

Launched in December 2023, this 232-layer NAND SSD, which adopts a M.2 2280 form factor, comes in at 512GB, 1TB and 2TB variations, and features a superb Phison E25 controller that can also be found in the Crucial T500 SSD. 

The controller fitted into the M3500 also features four-channel PICe Gen4 connectivity, which makes it  remarkable given its stellar performs when stacked up against eight-channel alternatives.

'An absolute masterpiece of engineering'

Crucial is Micron's retail arm, 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 configured specifically to be sold with particular hardware units, like those you'd find in our roundups of the best PCs or the best workstations.

The Micron 3500 SSD offers sequential reads and writes of up to 7,000 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s respectively, according to the manufacturer, with testing using CystalDiskMark corroborating those figures.

It performs incredibly capable in a host of benchmarks – from computing to gaming – and, importantly, this OEM SSD doesn't underperform significantly when compared against its retail version – the Crucial T500. In fact, it's on par in almost all benchmarks, despite being constrained slightly to meet OEM requirements.

It's so powerful, in fact, that it beats almost every eight-channel PCIe Gen4 SSD out there, with only the Samsung 990 Pro capable of beating it if it's configured to run in full power mode.

Ultimately, TweakTown heralds the unit as "an absolute masterpiece of engineering", adding: "Able to vanquish 99.99% of all 8-channel controlled PCIe Gen4 SSDs with half the channels is easily the most impressive feat we've ever witnessed from any SSD at any time."

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Keumars Afifi-Sabet
Keumars Afifi-Sabet
Channel Editor (Technology), Live Science

Keumars Afifi-Sabet is the Technology Editor for Live Science. He has written for a variety of publications including ITPro, The Week Digital and ComputerActive. He has worked as a technology journalist for more than five years, having previously held the role of features editor with ITPro. In his previous role, he oversaw the commissioning and publishing of long form in areas including AI, cyber security, cloud computing and digital transformation.