The Crucial MX300 750GB SSD Review: Micron's 3D NAND Arrives
by Billy Tallis on June 14, 2016 9:00 AM ESTConclusions
It appears that the Crucial MX300 will be priced as a mid-range SATA drive or slightly below that. On a 'Price per GB' metric alone the 3D TLC NAND isn't starting any revolutions, which means that again the association between TLC NAND and lower performance still rings true. Despite this, the performance is clearly higher and above the current glut of planar TLC drives that are competing in a race to the bottom.
One of the issues that Crucial will face is that despite being plus-one generation above the MX200, The MX300 is slightly slower and only by a small amount. It frequently straddles the dividing line between MLC performance and planar TLC performance. One issue on performance will be that it is also surpassed on several benchmarks by SanDisk's X400, one of the fastest planar TLC drives and a drive that will likely beat the MX300 on price. The 850 EVO level of performance is simply out of reach; Micron's 3D TLC drive is slower than Samsung's 3D TLC drive, and so will have to compete on price.
One thing to point out is that through our testing, we see that the MX300 has an acute weakness in its random read latency. At all but the highest queue depths it is half as fast as the top MLC drives that are only moderately faster than the MX200. Since this pattern holds at the lowest queue depths where parallelism and caching don't apply, there's a danger that this means Micron's 3D TLC is inherently quite slow to read from. This is most likely a carry on from when Micron implemented SLC write caching for the Crucial MX200:
With the MX200, the short-term performance boost of the SLC wasn't always worth the eventual cost of moving data from SLC to MLC. The SLC caching on the MX300 seems to greatly lower the power requirements of handling a small volume of writes, which may be a reason to use it even with the 3D MLC, especially if performance is sufficient to handle flushing a full write cache under load without a drastic slowdown. However, when the MX300's SLC write caching and spare area are exhausted, it slows down to the level of budget planar TLC drives. This is a drive that should not be filled to the brim and should not be subjected to enterprise workloads with heavy sustained writes.
Crucial SSDs: MX, BX and The Future
The future of Micron's Crucial SSDs is uncertain. When the MX100 launched, it was a hit by offering mainstream performance at great prices for the time. The BX100 showed up at even lower prices and with performance that was pretty close to the MX100. The MX200 added just enough performance to somewhat justify keeping two models around. Later the BX200 adopted TLC and sacrificed a lot of performance to cut costs, but failed to compete against the wave of budget drives based on Toshiba and Hynix TLC. Now that the MX line has also adopted TLC, it seems likely that the BX line will be retired along with planar NAND.
The interesting question is whether Crucial will introduce a higher end 3D MLC drive. We learned at Computex that a 3D MLC NVMe SSD will be released under Micron's Ballistix brand, a now separate sub-brand of Micron and different to Crucial. Thus the only potential for a new MLC drive from Crucial would be a high-end SATA drive. Many companies have been wondering whether it is worth trying to compete directly against the 850 Pro that has reigned for two years as the fastest SATA SSD and is very nearly the fastest possible SATA SSD (barring the use of pure SLC or 3D XPoint, neither of which will happen). Crucial might have the opportunity with Micron's 3D MLC to introduce a drive that is just as fast as the 850 Pro while being more power efficient, but it would still be tough to dethrone the 850 Pro unless Micron could also clearly undercut Samsung on price. Alternatively, we may see MLC become something that is mostly used on PCIe SSDs while the SATA SSD market is overrun by TLC.
| SSD Price Comparison (Sorted by Price/GB of Highest Capacity Drive) |
|||
| Drive | 960GB 1TB |
750GB | 480GB 512GB |
| OCZ Trion 150 | $199.99 (20.8¢/GB) | $109.99 (22.9¢/GB) | |
| SanDisk X400 | $229.49 (22.4¢/GB) | $124.49 (24.3¢/GB) | |
| SanDisk Ultra II | $219.56 (22.9¢/GB) | $127.31 (26.5¢/GB) | |
| Mushkin Reactor | $249.99 (24.4¢/GB) | $149.99 (29.3¢/GB) | |
| Crucial MX300 | $199.99 (26.7¢/GB) | ||
| Crucial MX200 | $269.94 (27.0¢/GB) | $139.00 (27.8¢/GB) | |
| PNY CS2211 | $289.99 (30.2¢/GB) | $129.99 (27.1¢/GB) | |
| Samsung 850 EVO | $306.76 (30.7¢/GB) | $153.95 (26.7¢/GB) | |
| SanDisk Extreme Pro | $338.08 (35.2¢/GB) | $189.99 (39.6¢/GB) | |
Final Words
To put this into perspective, under ordinary consumer and end-user/home workloads, the MX300 performs at its peak near the top of the TLC charts. On most tests we found the MX300 to be remarkably power efficient. Other things being equal, TLC is typically slower and more power hungry than MLC, but the MX300 is more power efficient on most benchmarks than most MLC drives. Having this level of efficiency is extremely promising for Micron's 3D MLC and an accomplishment worth some kudos.
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Arnulf - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
You can't tell a difference between NVMe drive with 2000 MB/s read speed and SATA drive with 500 MB/s read speed?I own 830, it's a great drive, but it's SATA drive.
Impulses - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
I'd believe it, at least for run of the mill tasks... More demanding usage cases and apps will see a benefit but for the average user gaming and doing web/office stuff? SATA is enough.Samus - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Just buy a used MLC drive dirt cheap on eBay. Even if it has 20TB written (what I've seen about average for used SSD's, but who knows) that'll still exponentially outlast a TLC drive, while being more consistent.Or just pick up a new old stock M500 480GB SSD for <$100. M500's are my go to drives. Still haven't seen one fail. Not lightening fast, not slow, but very reliable and consistent. Sandisk also makes quite a few 480GB MLC drives for <$100.
Stay away from TLC. I just don't believe in the long run they are going to have adequate data retention and reliability.
JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
>adequate data retention and reliability.Can you even name one instance of a TLC drive failing on you, dude?
Tech Report's already covered actual real-life endurance, and here you continuing this "SSD Endurance" meme, as if it mattered.
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-enduran...
Several TLC drives lasted for far more than 1 Petabyte read/writes. It's more likely that SATA port interfaces won't exist 10 years from now on the new motherboard you buy than a TLC drive you buy today would be dead with average daily use after a lifespan of 10 years.
Glaring_Mistake - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
The test Techreport ran did not really cover data retention, if their goal was to test data retention they would gone about it differently.Because instead of focusing on writing until the SSDs just laid down and died they would have used up a certain amount of write cycles and then left them unpowered and later tested if the data stored on them was intact.
An example of such tests not being indicative of data retention would of course be the 840 EVO managing over several PB of writes in such tests but despite how well it performed in those tests it still leaked electrons at a rapid rate for any data stored on it.
Also there is just one TLC drive in Techreports test and it came close to a PB of writes before it died but did not go past it.
Gigaplex - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
>Can you even name one instance of a TLC drive failing on you, dude?I've had one fail hours after unboxing it, but that can happen with any product. The warranty replacement worked fine.
I've also had a different one (840 non-EVO) have serious performance degradation issues, and Samsung only applied the firmware fix to the EVO versions.
Samus - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Joeyjojo. Do you even know what data retention is, dude?JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Data retention for SSDs for non-consumer workloads, for example the case of a NAS/SAN supplied with an SSD-only volume, isn't an issue. NAS/SANs should be up 24/7, and data retention is an issue of NAND retaining data despite long-term loss of power. NAS/SANs should be up 24/7, so therefore SSDs not having power in a NAS/SAN is a non-issue.Data retention for SSDs for consumer workloads, for example the case of a DAS, boot drive, or scratch drive, is again, mostly a non-issue. Boot drives and scratch drives get power every time the device is powered on, and most consumers using an SSD internally on a PC will actually boot their device at least once a week. DAS is more fickle, as this comes down to how often the user needs to use their external SSD, for example. Assuming someone actually went out of the way to buy a fast SSD-based external rather than a slower HDD-based external, would typically mean that they use their external drive often enough that they can warrant paying extra for less space, for the benefit of having faster storage.
Nobody uses SSDs as cold storage. Not even HDDs are useful for cold storage. This is where tape drives are best at, as they have the best data retention of any drive type on the market.
The entire argument of TLC-based SSDs having poor data retention should be a complete non-issue, because if you're using the SSD in its most suitable application (devices you use frequently that need the better speed that SSDs offer over HDDs, or network storage that is always available for other devices requesting files hosted on that server), then data retention is a non-issue.
It's like dogging on a sports car (ex: Mustang) for not being gas-efficient, or dogging on a hybrid-electric car (ex: Prius) for not being fast. Two different solutions for two different problems.
It's literally the same story for PC data storage. TLC, MLC, and SLC NAND-based SSDs are all worse at data retention than HDDs, and HDDs are worse at data retention than tape drives. If you wanted data retention, why are you even looking at SSDs? Likewise, if you wanted fuel-efficiency, why would you go to an online article talking about a brand new Dodge Viper that makes 12 MPG city, then make a post on the article dogging sports cars in general for awful fuel efficiency?
SSDs are a data storage product tuned for sequential and random read/write speeds, and TLC is a particular flavor of SSD NAND that's tuned for particularly cost-effective speed.
tl;dr
Get the right product for the right situation. If you're looking at SSDs for any kind of long-term data storage retention, then you pretty much have your head in the dirt.
Impulses - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Agreed.Samus - Saturday, June 18, 2016 - link
You do realize one of the reasons SSD's haven't been catching on in the PC market for the last decade comes down to data retention. If a manufacture builds a system, images it, and it sits in a box in a hot warehouse for 9-12 months, the data in many consumer level drives will be corrupted. Which means the system will be sent in for warranty to be reimaged and that isn't cost efficient for OEM's so they don't even bother putting themselves in that position.The Seagate SSHD's were unaffected by this aspect of solid state storage because they only cache high IO hit rates. If the buffer is corrupted tibia simply flushed and rebuilt. Odds are after a fresh image the buffer hasn't even been built yet because no more than one IO hit has occurred to any sector of the drive.
Believe me, I work in refurbishing and data retention of SSD's, even older MLC models, is a serious issue. Considering the number of voltage states is exponentially higher in TLC drives, data retention is an even greater issue. In refurbishing, the only was to actually recover a frozen or corrupted drive from data retention illness is a secure erase. And as I mentioned, some of these systems have manufacture dates just a year old (they could be new overstock that were shifted to our reseller because the warranty expired or they are older models...) and depending on how they were stored or where they sat, sometimes the systems can't even boot Windows to the OOBE.