The Crucial BX200 (480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Crucial's First TLC NAND SSD
by Billy Tallis on November 3, 2015 9:00 AM ESTIdle Power Consumption
Many SATA drives are getting close to the limits of what our equipment can measure for power consumption. It's hard to build a meter than has sub-milliwatt accuracy and can withstand the high peak currents drawn by devices like high-performance PCIe drives. Our test rig can't measure the deepest power saving modes (DevSlp), but we can look for any red flags that the intermediate modes aren't working.
The BX200 joins the club of drives than are very poor at managing power without DevSlp support. Its active power consumption and poor efficiency are enough to exclude it from being useful for laptops, so idle power isn't as important, but it's another disapointment.
TRIM Validation
A drive that didn't correctly implement the ATA TRIM command would be very surprising to find today, but it's a quick enough check. The trimcheck tool creates and then deletes a file on the disk, and later checks if the contents of the file are still accessible. In addition to verifying that TRIM is working correctly, this test also demonstrates that, for better or worse, files that are deleted cannot be easily recovered.
Nothing about the drive is completely broken, and TRIM does indeed work.
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melgross - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Not true. If you put music and video files on this, it's perfectly adequate.garbagedisposal - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
That doesn't mean anything. A hard drive would work beautifully for music and video toopetteyg359 - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
Not if the drive motor is louder than the music...LB-ID - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Why in the world would you be using a space-limited, relatively expensive SSD for storage like that when you could get MUCH better price/performance ratio out of a mechanical drive?SmokingCrop - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Simple, the horrible noise that comes out of mechanical drives. It's definitely the loudest thing in my system.Pissedoffyouth - Sunday, November 8, 2015 - link
You could definitely hear the hard drive on my old PC, but my WD Reds are damn silent in my new one. Can't hear them at all. Only by holding the caser you can feel the slight vibrationtamalero - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
you must have one hell of a horrible computer case or using very old mechanical drives to hear that.squngy - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link
Either that, or premium silent fans...If you build a system with the intent of keeping it as quite as possible and are willing to spend some extra money and or sacrifice some performance then you will hear mechanical drives over other components at least occasionally (seek and spinup).
nagi603 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
Your case must be an old, cheap one, or one not particularly designed for home use. (Or you are missing the side panel.) Try one that comes with mechanical decoupling groumets, like every decent case for more than a couple years back. E.g.: Antec or Fractal Design cases. Or go el-cheapo and just suspend the HDD with bungie cord in the 5.25" slots. Voila, no more noise.royalcrown - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
Try dropping your external mechanical HDD while on, then try it with an SSD and see...one thing you needn't worry about is moving your system while it's on with ssd, (or bumping it)