The Crucial MX300 750GB SSD Review: Micron's 3D NAND Arrives

ATTO

ATTO's Disk Benchmark is a quick and easy freeware tool to measure drive performance across various transfer sizes.

Crucial MX300 750GBADATA Premier SP550 480GBADATA XPG SX930 480GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial BX100 1TBCrucial BX200 480GBCrucial BX200 960GBCrucial MX100 512GBCrucial MX200 500GBCrucial MX200 1TBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBOCZ Trion 150 480GBOCZ Trion 150 960GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBOCZ Vector 180 960GBSamsung 850 EVO M.2 500GBSamsung 850 EVO 1TBSamsung 850 Pro 512GBSamsung 850 Pro 1TBSamsung 850 Pro 2TBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 960GBSanDisk X400 1TBToshiba Q300 480GBIntel SSD 750 1.2TB (PCIe 3.0 x4 - NVMe)Samsung SM951 512GB (PCIe 3.0 x4 - AHCI)Samsung XP941 512GB (PCIe 2.0 x4 - AHCI)Samsung 950 Pro 512GB

The ATTO performance plot shows that small reads are slow but performance is reasonably stable for large transfers, albeit a little slower than the MX200.

AS-SSD

AS-SSD is another quick and free benchmark tool. It uses incompressible data for all of its tests, making it an easy way to keep an eye on which drives are relying on transparent data compression. The short duration of the test makes it a decent indicator of peak drive performance.

AS-SSD shows the MX300 read speed as suffering slightly, but the (SLC cached) write speed as perfectly normal.

Idle Power Consumption

Since the ATSB tests based on real-world usage cut idle times short to 25ms, their power consumption scores paint an inaccurate picture of the relative suitability of drives for mobile use. During real-world client use, a solid state drive will spend far more time idle than actively processing commands. Our testbed doesn't support the deepest DevSlp power saving mode that SATA drives can implement, but we can measure the power usage in the intermediate slumber state where both the host and device ends of the SATA link enter a low-power state and the drive is free to engage its internal power savings measures.

We also report the drive's idle power consumption while the SATA link is active and not in any power saving state. Drives are required to be able to wake from the slumber state in under 10 milliseconds, but that still leaves plenty of room for them to add latency to a burst of I/O. Because of this, many desktops default to either not using SATA Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) at all or to only enable it partially without making use of the device-initiated power management (DIPM) capability. Additionally, SATA Hot-Swap is incompatible with the use of DIPM, so our SSD testbed usually has DIPM turned off during performance testing.

Marvell's latest controller allows for great slumber power savings, but Micron needs to work on improving active idle power draw.