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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hechacker1 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Is the driver not included with Windows 10 yet?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Windows 8.1 includes basic NVMe support and will boot from a NVMe drive with no trouble. Windows 10 added support for some of the more obscure features like the administrative commands necessary for secure erase. But the driver loading that has the most potential to affect boot performance is the UEFI NVMe driver, which some motherboards might not load until after probing for the existence of any NVMe devices that they would need to inspect for the presence of a bootloader.Impulses - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Don't see how that's possible unless your needs are pretty basic and sufficiently sated by a single drive, maybe two, in which case you probably don't need the performance of a PCI-E drive...Running a smaller 256GB SM951 here and two SATA 1TB 850 EVO, the only thing I see changing in that equation is going to 512GB for the OS apps drive and to multiple 2TB drives on the SATA side.
Whether PCI-E drives should cost more than SATA ones or not isn't the issue, they're gonna keep carrying a premium as long as they're only really useful to a small niche... The only thing that will potentially lower prices quickly is their common use on laptops, but they can also opt for lower end SATA M.2 drives.
Lolimaster - Saturday, June 18, 2016 - link
The main things most of the users notices changing and HDD for an SSD is the orders of magnitude lower latency/access time and 4k/4k random performance.That's why unless you have an specific need for faster transfer rates people wont notices differences between pcie/sata ssd,
smilingcrow - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
“The lack of significant competition in the PCIE3.0 X4 NAND drives bringing down prices quickly is disconcerting.Buying into SATAIII SSDs at this point in time simply is a bad idea comparatively.”
But on the other hand buying into PCIe drives at this point when the pricing is so high when for many users the benefits over SATA drives is minimal for general usage makes them a bad idea relatively.
azazel1024 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Or, you know, for all of the folks who don't have a chipset or board that supports m.2, let alone m.2 PCI-e drives currently. I am still rolling an Ivy Bridge. No m.2 anywhere in my system, and frankly the extra cost to go with an M.2 to PCI-e bridge card, to then pay a premium on an m.2 PCI-e based drive to then drop in...and not confident my board can actually boot from PCI-e storage...Yeah, SATA for me. Frankly drives are cheap enough it isn't that big a deal if I end up dropping $70-80 on an MLC 240GB drive that I use for a couple of years before shuffling it off in to my server as it's boot drive and get an m.2 PCI-e ~480GB drive or similar when finally upgrading my computer to Kaby/Castle.
One benchmark that I wish Anand would do that I have seen a few other sites do are some of the PRACTICAL benchmarks. Such as application load times, or other disk intensive operations to compare between drives, especially between "empty" and "full" states.
Do many users care if Photoshop launches in 5.2s versus 6s of a slower drive? Possibly not, but there probably are some who do. What about reloading 50 web browser tabs? Or loading 100 RAW images from disk in photoshop? A handful of real world tests would be nice to provide some more perspective too. The few sights that do, do that kind of stuff, MLC drives generally seem to have a pretty commanding lead over MLC. Again, many users might not care about shaving a second or two off an application launch time, but some do.
Impulses - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
I went with an M.2 boot drive after seeing the difference it makes in some demanding Adobe tasks on HardOCP's reviews (of the 750 IIRC), but I chose an SM951 with confidence based largely on AT's exhaustive reviews... So yeah I'd agree, some practical tests beyond the patented AT torture tests would be nice, specially at this juncture where some people are still asking whether PCI-E/M.2 is for them... At the end of the day tho, the old cliche probably serves most well, if you even gotta ask then you're probably fine with a SATA drive.Billy Tallis - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
Our AnandTech Storage Bench Light, Heavy and Destroyer tests are the tests you're looking for. They're composed entirely of real-world I/O from things like Photoshop, web browsing, gaming, virus scanning, software development and virtual machine use. It wouldn't be useful for us to report dozens of subscores breaking out each individual application: that's an overwhelming amount of data to present and contextualize, short tests of individual applications are harder to make repeatable and valid with high enough resolution, and if you have a single specific use that is most important to you, our synthetic benchmarks probably cover that. Instead we present and analyze three different real-world mixes of I/O.Impulses - Friday, June 17, 2016 - link
It's just hard to translate the results from the Storage Bench to real world impact Billy... Sometimes people just like knowing "oh, it'll actually cut that workload in half". Some may be able to extrapolate that from the AT Bench but it's not immediately obvious. I don't think anyone's asking for a breakdown of every single app involved in the traces, maybe one or two of the most stressful tho? Just a thought.Lolimaster - Saturday, June 18, 2016 - link
They're not.Unless you move tons of data per day with more than 1 pci-e nvme drive there's no difference between sata and pcie ssd's. PCie ssd uses more power and produces more heat.