The Crucial BX300 (480GB) SSD Review: Back To MLC
by Billy Tallis on August 29, 2017 9:00 AM ESTPower Management
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled.
The active idle power consumption of the Crucial BX300 is the same as for the BX200. Both are a bit on the high side, but there are Silicon Motion drives with both higher and lower active idle draws. With SATA link power management enabled, the BX300's idle power draw is better than average, but 20mW worse than what the BX200 and Intel 545s manage with older and newer Silicon Motion controllers.
The BX200 had a serious problem with idle wake-up latency of over 10ms, which the BX300 has fixed. The BX300 wakes up quickly, though the drives with the Phison S10 controller are still the quickest by far.
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Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
It's true, especially on sale, the 850 EVO is an incredible value for performance focused SATA shoppers. But if you are ok with 80-90% of the real world performance of an 850 EVO, you can get that from pretty much any modern SSD for much less. Various Sandisk drives (like the Ultra II) and even Mushkin drives are good performance, still use MLC, and are cheaper.m16 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
It might have a "horrible" wake up time, but that is still really fast and will probably not be an issue on anything at all.The drive seems like a steal, and the only thing that it is missing is temperature throttling available in the higher end MX series. Which is also not an issue except in higher end laptops that produce a lot of heat or really small desktops with a beast of a CPU/GPU setup and not enough ventilation.
MrCommunistGen - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I realize they're targeting the BX300 at the lower end and for lower price points, but I'd have really loved to have seen a 960GB model.Also, I'm really loving that the full-drive performance is close to the empty performance, unlike so many other recent drives on 1xnm TLC, Micron 3D TLC, and/or are DRAM-less.
damianrobertjones - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
There's a 1tb model?Wubinator - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
No there isn'thttp://www.crucial.com/usa/en/ssd/series--BX300?cm...
MrCommunistGen - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
I was trying to say that I wish Crucial had decided to make a 960GB model... but they didn't. Performance, Performance/Watt, $/GB are all great. I want a bigger drive with all those attributes.creed3020 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Great review Billy! Consistent execution on the writing and the newer format graphs are a nice refresh for the SSD review format. Keep these coming.I still wish the MX100 was in the charts to get a better grasp on the generational changes.
jabber - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
99% of Hardware review sites always make this mistake. They always ignore the hardware that most people will have i.e. the hardware from the past 2-3 years. They just always test against the stuff they had sent them 6 months previous that most still haven't bothered to upgrade to. Most of the benches have little relevance to most users wanting to know how the new stuff compares to theirs. It's really frustrating.ComputerGuy2006 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I agree, I have the Bx100 and I would be interesting in a direct comparison. Even the "ssd 2015 bench" does not have the bx300 right now so I can't compare them.Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
Lucky, the BX100 was an amazing value back in the day (hah, 2 years ago) and still holds up.