The Crucial MX300 750GB SSD Review: Micron's 3D NAND Arrives
by Billy Tallis on June 14, 2016 9:00 AM ESTMixed Random Read/Write Performance
The mixed random I/O benchmark starts with a pure read test and gradually increases the proportion of writes, finishing with pure writes. The queue depth is 3 for the entire test and each subtest lasts for 3 minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. As with the pure random write test, this test is restricted to a 16GB span of the drive, which is empty save for the 16GB test file.
Despite poor random read speeds, the MX300 is only slightly slower than the MX200 on mixed random workloads, and is faster than most MLC drives.
Once more setting a power usage record, the MX300 is more efficient than even the BX100.
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The MX300 manages to never decrease in performance when the proportion or writes increases, showing that its SLC write caching is working very effectively. Power consumption doesn't begin to increase until the test is almost completely writes.
Mixed Sequential Read/Write Performance
The mixed sequential access test covers the entire span of the drive and uses a queue depth of one. It starts with a pure read test and gradually increases the proportion of writes, finishing with pure writes. Each subtest lasts for 3 minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The drive is filled before the test starts.
Since SATA drives all perform about the same on sequential reads, rankings on this test are determined mainly by sequential write performance and whether the controller can process the mixed workload effectively. The MX300 is slower than the SanDisk X400 but faster than the other planar TLC drives.
With another third place ranking for power usage, the MX300 beats all the planar TLC drives on efficiency but is unremarkable by MLC standards.
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The MX300 bottoms out around 126MB/s which would be respectable for a planar TLC drive, but the MX200 never drops below 200MB/s.
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Lonyo - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Um, the conclusion is entirely negative. Read the conclusion? It's slow, but not as slow as planar TLC drives. It's inexpensive, but not super cheap. It's a generation "above" in naming of the MX200, but is slower. It has to compete on price because it can't compete on performance. It has an acute weakness in random reads.The main strengths are that it's fairly power efficient.
rtho782 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Meh, another SSD to compete on price. They have really become commodities!cknobman - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Not cheaper.Slower.
Uses more power.
No improvement on endurance.
Am I missing anything major here?
I just dont see anything that is purchase worthy here.
azazel1024 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
If you need >512GB, but don't NEED 1TB and can't justify the price of a 1TB drive.I need to, sadly, buy a new SSD soon and I've been going back and forth between MLC and TLC. My issue is that my budget is extremely limited right now, but I also can't wait a whole lot longer.
The 240/256GB TLC drives just seem to have shite for performance once their SLC caches are filled, and their random read performances are nothing to write home about either. They also tend to have small SLC caches, which increases the likelihood of hitting the cache limit and near full drive performance is especially bad on most of them and I have about 130GB of data I need to transfer off a 120 and a 60GB SSD to it to run one SSD boot drive. 480/512GB TLC drives at around $110-120 are a bit out of my price range (yes, my budget is THAT limited), but it would keep utilized capacity fairly low.
240/256GB MLC drives on the other hand tend to have much better performance, especially as the drive fills up, except the MX200 :-(. Which means in the 240-256GB capacity range, an MX200 isn't much of an option for me. Right now I am looking at a PNY 2211 240GB drive as it seems to be a good blend of price and performance, especially performance once the drive is pretty highly utilized, and I have to face the fact that I might only have 130GB of data to move to the drive right now, but I am sure drive utilization will creep up to 150, 160, 170, 180GB given a year or two (I have a 5.4GiB RAID0 array for bulk storage of 2x3TB drives, but applications aren't getting smaller, even if I stay good on keeping only a few games loaded on the SSD at a time).
Sadly MLC 480/512GB are just well outside my price range right now.
What would be nice is seeing m.2 PCI-e based drives that aren't such a huge jump in $ per GB.
DanNeely - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
While TLC drives do slow down a lot once the SLC cache is exhausted, unless you're doing video editing, batch processing of media files, etc sustained multi-gigabyte writes tend to be very uncommon in the consumer market. SLC caches are used because they're large enough to handle normal use. You really need to be pushing a lot of data at once to exhaust them.jabber - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
I've tried cloning a existing build to the TLC type SSDs (I often will build a machine using a old 64GB SSD then clone it over when the new larger SSD arrives) and the write speeds can drop below 40MBps after about 2 minutes of cloning. We are talking about mainstream SSDs with USB2.0 levels of performance. Even a 5400 RPM HDD will do better.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Our sequential write test runs for three minutes at each queue depth. The slowest 3-minute average we've recorded at any queue depth was 61MB/s. For your drive cloning to be running at only 40MB/s after a mere two minutes, there has to be some other bottleneck. Your software is probably preventing the copy from proceeding at full speed, such as by alternating reading from the source drive and writing to the destination.jabber - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
I said about 2 minutes. I don't actually have an exact record as I wasn't writing an article or review but let's say very soon after starting the cloning the performance dropped to a 'unacceptable' level. Anything below 200MBps write in a 2016 SSD should be classed as unacceptable. By the way it was a BX200 SSD.vladx - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Yes, most TLC drives are enough for consumer drives. In fact, I'd bet my 840 EVO still kicks this MX300's ass.Byte - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Truth be told I bet the 830 might still beat it. I put my 830 in my new 4.5GHz skylake system and it was still blazing fast. Put in a m.2 950pro and can't really even tell a difference. Now the low end stuff like Sandisk SSD Plus, you can actually tell its slower at everything.