Crucial MX100 (256GB & 512GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on June 2, 2014 3:00 PM ESTRandom Read/Write Speed
The four corners of SSD performance are as follows: random read, random write, sequential read and sequential write speed. Random accesses are generally small in size, while sequential accesses tend to be larger and thus we have the four Iometer tests we use in all of our reviews.
Our first test writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). We perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time.
Random read performance remains mostly unchanged. The 512GB MX100 appears to be slightly faster than the M550 while the 256GB version is a few megabytes slower.
Random write performance, on the other hand, is slightly up at the lower queue depths. This is likely due to firmware optimizations as the performance is up regardless of the capacity, although once the queue depth is increased the 256GB version falls behind due to the more limited amount of NAND die.
Sequential Read/Write Speed
To measure sequential performance we run a 1 minute long 128KB sequential test over the entire span of the drive at a queue depth of 1. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length.
Sequential performance is also up by a bit, although the difference isn't dramatic.
AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Read/Write Performance
The AS-SSD sequential benchmark uses incompressible data for all of its transfers. The result is a pretty big reduction in sequential write speed on SandForce based controllers.
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sonny73n - Saturday, December 20, 2014 - link
Samsung Evo comes to mind ;-)MikeMurphy - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
330MB/s reads with zero random access penalty is ample for 99.99% of the users out there.There isn't much (or any) real world difference between this and something faster.
isa - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
Yes, I'd love to see a link to a $100 external SSD with 550MB/s at 95k IOPS.UltraWide - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
Do you plan to include tests with encryption enabled in the future? Thank you.Zoomer - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
And does it support bitlocker eDrive / OPAL, etc?stickmansam - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
Dang those prices look goodMakes me wish I had waited to grab the MX100 instead of getting the SP920
Similar sustained performance but MX100 has better GC and consistency
nfriedly - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
Neither of the Samsung buttons work for the last chart on http://www.anandtech.com/show/8066/crucial-mx100-2...The error in the firebug console is "TypeError: document.getElementById(...) is null"
JarredWalton - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
Fixed, thanks!MikeMurphy - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
Why are 4k random reads so much slower than 4k random writes? Or, are the graphs mislabeled and mixed up?khkha - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
I have just bought seagate 600 for my early 2011 mbp. Should I return the drive and buy this instead for 30gb space bump?Thoughts anyone?