The Crucial BX200 (480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Crucial's First TLC NAND SSD
by Billy Tallis on November 3, 2015 9:00 AM ESTWrapping things up, we knew going into the review that Crucial would face some performance challenges with the move to TLC, and that matching the BX100's good all-around performance would be tricky. A significant drop in random read speeds was listed in the specs, but Crucial advertises modest improvements to other performance metrics. Unfortunately, the BX200 was harder hit than we initially expected.
Random and sequential write speeds both suffer, and sequential writes were hurt relatively more as compared with the BX100. Sequential read speeds were fine, and elsewhere things aren't quite bad enough to make it a one-legged stool. The most acute weaknesses are in areas that are less important to typical desktop usage. Peak performance is much better than sustained performance and reads speeds are much better than write speeds, so for interactive use the BX200 will be much more responsive than most of our tests indicate.
Given our earlier discussion on TLC NAND and consumer pressure to bring down drive prices, it's easy to understand why Crucial wanted to release a TLC drive in the BX series. But it's hard to understand why they're releasing it in what seems to be such a poor performing state. The drive clearly needs at least a firmware overhaul, and it's a horrible way to introduce Micron's 16nm TLC to the world. The BX100 doesn't need a successor yet, as it's still the best all around value you can get from a SSD.
Crucial plans to rapidly retire the BX100, so the BX200 will soon be standing alone as Crucial's budget offering. If the BX100 is being retired for having poor profit margins, then it seems like it could tolerate a bit of a price increase and still have a place in the market. If the switch is motivated by Micron diverting large amounts of production capacity from MLC to TLC, then we have to question the viability of their plans for roling out TLC. Micron needs to introduce a good TLC product as soon as possible to demonstrate that the 16nm TLC has a reason for existing in the first place. From what we've seen so far, Micron may have been better off sticking with MLC until after switching to 3D NAND.
| Amazon Price Comparison (11/3/2015) | |||
| Drive | 240/250/256GB | 480/500/512GB | 960GB/1TB |
| Crucial BX200 (MSRP) | $84.99 | $149.99 | $299.99 |
| ADATA Premier SP550 | $72.99 | $154.99 | - |
| SanDisk Ultra II | $83.99 | $153.99 | $299.00 |
| Crucial BX100 | $79.99 | $159.99 | $360.00 |
| Crucial MX200 | $94.99 | $169.99 | $329.99 |
| Plextor M6V | $99.99 | $189.99 | - |
| OCZ Trion 100 | $93.99 | $175.36 | $349.99 |
| OCZ Arc 100 | $91.99 | $149.99 | - |
| Samsung 850 EVO | $87.99 | $163.88 | $346.00 |
In the end the MSRP for the BX200 is around or below where retail prices for the BX100 have been—$85 for 240GB and $150 for 480GB—so it likely will be cheaper than its predecessor and push SSD prices at or below $0.30/GB. But even being the cheapest SSD on the market wouldn't be sufficient to earn a recommendation; almost anything else would be worth paying extra for. We have a saying around here that "there's no such thing as a bad product, only a bad price" and even for the BX200 this is true. But at MSRP, the BX200 won't be putting much price pressure on the rest of the market, and there are other drives with similar prices and better performance. The best thing for consumers right now would be for the BX200 to further push down costs, at which point it can survive as a true low-budget SSD.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
85 Comments
View All Comments
redzo - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
It's a disaster. I think that Crucial was better of not releasing the damn thing. What were they thinking? The performance gap is huge compared to samsung's evo. This product just shows that samsung rules TLC. All educated buyers will think twice before purchasing it even at 15/20$ lower than this.KAlmquist - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
What makes it a disaster is that Crucial is replacing a successful product (the BX100) with this thing. Keep the BX100 around, give the new drive a designation like AX100, market it as a budget alternative to the BX100, and the drive might be a modest success.When the BX100 disappears, that will leave the Samsung 850 EVO as the paradigm of the SATA SSD sweet spot, with good balance of performance, quality, and attractive pricing.
paulgj - Monday, November 9, 2015 - link
They should name it the BX50 :-)tabascosauz - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
The BX200 should be compared to the SP550 from ADATA. Both are budget drives, both SM2256 (which has left a much crappier first impression than the actually promising SM2246EN), both TLC, yet the SP550 does better as a budget drive.KAlmquist - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Yup. I would be excited about the performance of the BX200 if I worked for ADATA.Dritman - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
This is actually embarrassing, to put this product into today's market, at any price. You cannot step backwards THIS far.A crap review is like one of the cheap OCZ drives, except they're understandably bad, because they're so cheap and kinda in line with the price.
With this thing though, it's much worse than anyone could have imagined.
bennyg - Tuesday, November 10, 2015 - link
80mb/s sequential write is not that bad in a SSD. If it were made in 2009.TonyCL6 - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
The comparison chart should add Samsung 840EVO (planer 19nm TLC) and ADATA SP550 (planer Hynix 16nm TLC) to be more meaningful. It helps users understand the sustain Seq. write (after pSLC cache ran out) performance differences between planer TLC of Samsung 19nm, Toshiba 19nm, Hynix 16nm and Micron 16nm.Kutark - Sunday, November 15, 2015 - link
Can someone answer a question for me. It says these are capable of roughly 500MB/s read and write, however SATA3 obviously saturates around 200. Are those figures for m.2 PCIE versions of the drive or? Cus I see them advertised for the 2.5" SATA drives and im a little confused.I was about to build a skylake setup as a Christmas gift to myself, however I was looking at some of the NVMe drives etc, to get better perf than SATA3 can offer, however, they're significantly more expensive per GB. So, if I can get something with a sustained 500 read/write like this, (or maybe a "pro" version, i.e. non NVME) I'd rather save the money, as realistically in a gamer situation the difference between 500mb/s and 1000 is gonna be negligible.
NJCompguy - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
Despite the abysmal performance of this drive, it's still light years faster then a 5400RPM mechanical drive. I picked up this drive (240GB version) for $65.00 - it made my friends laptop feel brand new after installing a fresh copy of Windows 10. She could not have been happier with this drive. People to often get caught up in the technical details and lose sight of the "big picture" of upgrading from a slow hard drive to an SSD. This drive is perfect for those that just want a laptop to boot up quicker.