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Business or pleasure? Crucial MX200 and BX100 1TB SSDs

Take your pick, and don't worry about the price tag

RAIN maker

Now, we’re used to hearing and reading from manufacturers that this or that drive is “the fastest thing on the planet” but, somewhat shockingly, Crucial actually admit that the BX100 isn’t. To quote from the product sheet: “The Crucial BX100 SSD isn’t the fastest drive on the market, but that’s squarely our intent”.

Instead, the BX100 is aimed at offering a balance between value and performance.

Crucial BX100 SSD

BX100 PCB bottom

Crucial may say they are not the fastest drives around but a glance at the specs suggest they aren’t that bad for a drive in this class, either. All four drives have the same quoted sequential speed of up to 535MB/s for reads with writes dependent on capacity – 450GB/s for the 1TB and 500GB/s models, 370GB/s for the 250GB and 185GB/s for the entry level 120GB drive.

Apart from the controller, the other thing that sets the BX100 apart is the very short feature list, in comparison to the M500, M550 and MX100 drives. Indeed, it doesn’t have any of the hardware encryption usually associated with Crucial drives. Nor does it have any of the other goodies: RAIN (redundant array of independent NAND); data defence; power loss protection; write acceleration; or dynamic thermal protection. It does have thermal monitoring but is unable to throttle back the drive if temperatures get too excessive.

Endurance for the BX100 is the same as the MX100 – a TBW (total bytes written) figure of 72TB, the equivalent to 40GB of writes per day for 5 years. As I mentioned earlier, I managed to get my hands on the flagship 1TB models of both ranges to see how they perform against the mighty Samsung 850 EVO and the flagship of the MX100 range, the 512GB drive.

Crucial BX100 SSD

CrystalDiskMark results for default (left) and compressible data (right)

Going back to that Crucial statement about the BX100 not being the fastest drive around: that might be so for its write performance but, judging from its sequential read performance, in the ATTO and CrystalDiskMark benchmarks, it’s plenty fast enough. It beat the drives I compared it against in both benchmarks and with a result of 560MB/s in ATTO, it's a fair bit faster than the 535MB/s in Crucial’s specifications.

The quoted sequential write performance of 450MB/s was pretty much spot on according to the 454MB/s and 459MB/s from the ATTO and CDM tests, respectively. The Silicon Motion controller is another that doesn’t seem to mind whether it’s dealing with in-compressed or compressed data when comparing the two sets of CDM results, although the 4K write result has dropped in the compressed data test.

The drive performed better than expected in FutureMark’s PCMark 8 Consistency Test (Average Bandwidth for all 18 tests), its level of recovery being better than the MX200 but still lagging behind the TLC V-NAND equipped Samsung 850 EVO.

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