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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euskalzabe - Sunday, June 19, 2016 - link
Excellent reply, bravo.tonyman - Thursday, June 23, 2016 - link
To refute your point that "Nobody Uses SSDs for Cold Storage", I'll give a real-world counterexample... I make a machine vision system that I sell into a factory environment. I build the PCs that the system runs on, and sell it as a turnkey system. For reliability and performance, these PCs are equipped with SSDs as their boot and data drives. As this system, and therefore the PC it runs on, is mission critical, many customers purchase extra preconfigured PCs from us... which can sit around for several years before being used. Data retention on the boot drives of these cold-stored PCs is therefore quite a big issue... one I was ignorant of until a year or so ago, unfortunately. Oops.JKJK - Thursday, June 23, 2016 - link
Raid 0 for storage?Russian rulette ... catch you on the flipside.
sor - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
The MX300 had best in class mixed read/write power performance, and close to the best in other power benchmarks. It seems to beat it's primary competitors (< $.30/GB) on performance, like the OCZ Trion. It could be a better value to make it an obvious buy, but it seems fair to me. It costs less and performs worse than the > $.30/gb range and costs more and performs better than the < $.25/GB.barleyguy - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
"uses more power" isn't accurate. The power usage under load is flat out excellent.Byte - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Pricing average for 1TB(960GB) is about $200 (you can get ocz trion or silicon power at this price point every day, they are decent mainstream SSDs). This would need to be $150 to even be worth considering. If this had better performance maybe I can see it being worth more. I used a ton of Crucial SSDs and they are fine, but so are pretty much all the other brands i've used. I've only had 1 sandisk low end SSD die on me, and i've handled a few hundred.Gondalf - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Techreport (and Anandtech) say the contrary and i think they are a lot more reliable than you like hardware testers.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
More power hungry, worse endurance, slower, and more expensive then the competition. Truly an amazing drive ! /sJoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Oh no! Less SSD endurance! My current SSD gets winded after only 30 seconds of running! Whatever shall I do with typical consumer I/O workloads and less "endurance"!?[/sarcasm]kyuu - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Do people even read the article before posting negative crap anymore?It's not more power hungry. In fact, the article shows that it's quite power efficient.
I also hope you're not seriously comparing the MSRP of this drive versus the street prices of other drives. Street prices are always lower than the MSRP, especially in the SSD market.