The Crucial BX200 (480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Crucial's First TLC NAND SSD
by Billy Tallis on November 3, 2015 9:00 AM ESTSequential Read Performance
Just like the random read test, sequential reads are tested across the span of a full drive and a representative sample of queue depths. This test performs 128kB reads. Most operations involving large files (typically images and videos) fall under this test's purveiw, but streaming or playing even the highest resolution videos doesn't require anywhere near the full bandwidth of a SSD. Copying files to another SSD or loading very large files into an editing program will more likely use all the speed that's available.
At last we see respectable performance from the BX200. Its sequential read speeds aren'te quite up to the SATA limit at low queue depths, but it can sustain solid performance. Unfortunately, for anyone holding out hope that the poor results we've seen so far may be a testbed issue, the otherwise respectable sequential performance puts that idea to rest.
Power consumption on sequential reads is actually good, though it won't catch up with the best of drives.
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Given a larger queue depth, the BX200 is actually able to reach the performance plateau of the SATA speed limit; it just takes a little longer than the top tier of drives. Given the performance, it's not surprising to see that power consumption doesn't grow much. The shallow but steady decline in power consumption for the 480GB drive may be a sign that it's able to do some prefetching and caching to reduce the number of times it has to read from the flash.
Sequential Write Performance
The sequential write isn't limited to a small span of the disk, as that usually doesn't make a difference for this performance metric. As always, our averages are of the lower queue depths, but scaling to higher queue depths is also investigated. Bulk file copies and recording uncompressed video are the kind of uses that depend on sequential write performance.
The initial good news we saw with the BX200's sequential read performance didn't last long. The drive's write performance is bad for sequential access just like random access, unfortunately displacing the Trion 100 as one of the worst drives in our current collection.
The BX200 power consumption during sequential writing is poor but not radically so. It would seem that Micron's TLC flash requires at most a little more power to write to than other TLC, and this drive is just wasting most of that power budget on background management.
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Looking at larger queue depths, performance drops slightly after QD1, and stays low as power consumption shifts around some but is always high. Neither capacity of the BX100 can sustain even 100MB/s of writes for a length of time.
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zeeBomb - Sunday, November 8, 2015 - link
Less bits the better?Dahak - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
So I had primarily just skimmed the article, but for a successor to the BX100 its not.I wonder if there is some firmware bug that might be causing an issue.
I have used the BX100s fine in general office settings, but i many need to pass on these and start to look for an alternative
mczak - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Honestly I think the BX200 as a cheap SSD makes sense. The problem with the BX100 was that it was "too good". There was just about no difference in performance to the MX200 (faster in some benchmarks even), there was some feature differences (for instance no AES encryption, albeit this seems to have been an artificial firmware limitation as the controller supports it) but who cares about that in client ssds. But on the downside, there was just about no price difference to the MX200 neither, some shops selling some capacities of the BX100 actually for more than the same capacities for the MX200 sometimes. So the Crucial BX100 and MX200 were really pretty much the same in nearly all aspects.But with BX200 this changes - the MX200 now clearly is the better product, but the BX200 definitely is cheaper (or at least retail prices really need to be cheaper). Albeit the benchmarks are definitely concerning - even with tlc nand it shouldn't be THAT bad, maybe indeed the firmware is to blame.
hojnikb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Actually, TLC is pretty bad and is mostly the sole reason why this drive performs so badly. Remove the SLC cache and it would be much worse (especially on paper).mczak - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
I don't quite agree. There's other tlc nand ssds in the benchmarks. Even if you exclude the 850 Evo (with its 3d nand) there's still the (toshiba tlc nand based) ocz trion 100. And this performs quite ok - sure it's not exactly leading but it doesn't trail by huge amounts in some benchmarks like the bx200 does. I'd have expected the bx200 to perform close to that rather than a league of its own as far as slow ssds go... I don't know though if that's due to differences between toshiba tlc and micron tlc or if that's due to controllers.Drumsticks - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
It can't be *just* the NAND. The other TLC based drives in the charts perform much closer to "mainstream" than "absolutely terrible at everything"hojnikb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
its pretty hard to make good tlc. so yeah, tlc from micron simply sux. no other way around it.its no controllers fault, as it should perform just fine on its own, since its based off *46
DanNeely - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Assuming the street price does settle in at a reasonable discount to MSRP (and thus is cheaper than most other budget drives), these look like a reasonable option for office work. It look ~4 minutes of sustained full writes for the 480GB model to choke. Outside of photo/video editing the only time a normal user is going to hit that long of a sustained write is for OS or very large software installs. The rest of the time, most writes will be a few seconds at most before an idle period gives the drive time to catch up and flush the ram/SLC caches; meaning they should mostly sit in the (short) burst where the drives IO is similar to what much higher end drives achieve; and most longer operations will still fit in the middle plateau which is similar in performance to most budget drives on the market.beginner99 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Too expensive or too low performance. I think everyone can afford that $20 to step up to a MX200 or similar. And this $20 is more than worth it given the extra performance. Off topic but I would also like how older SSDs fare in these benches just as a comparison. Say I have an intel G2, will I actually gain anything noticeable from moving to a new SSD?Mangosteen - Thursday, November 5, 2015 - link
Yup! You can go to anandtechs excellent bench:http://anandtech.com/bench/SSD/65
The 2013 benchmarks include a "Intel X25-M G2 160GB" (or the 80GB) which is what I'm going to assume is an Intel G2.
You can compare 1 to 1 with any SSD for example with a 250GB 850 Evo you see big gains just about everywhere, so you will definitely gain performance but will that actually be noticeable to you i have no idea because it depends on what you will use it for. For sure it won't be AS big a gap as going from a HDD to an SSD was but you may notice some small gains. It's hilarious because in the overall listing of all the ssd's there is a "Velociraptor 10,000 rpm" HDD to compare to the SSD's which is awesome. Keep in mind also that you get a new (probably better) warranty and a larger guaranteed durability.