The Crucial BX300 (480GB) SSD Review: Back To MLC

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The Crucial BX300 is tied for second-fastest average data rate on The Destroyer among SATA drives. The BX300's performance falls between the Samsung 850 EVO and 850 PRO, and matches the Intel 545s that uses a newer generation of 3D NAND and a newer SSD controller.

The BX300's latency during The Destroyer is best in class, with both average and 99th percentile latencies at the top of the chart.

Breaking the average latency score down by read and write operations, we find the BX300 in second place for each subscore, but with a different drive in first place each time: the 850 PRO is what beats the BX300's average read latency, and the Crucial MX200 beats the BX300's average write latency.

The Crucial BX300 does a great job keeping read latency low throughout the destroyer, with the lowest 99th percentile read latency out of this bunch of drives. By contrast, the 99th percentile write latency only ranks third, behind the Intel 545s and Samsung 850 PRO. The MX300's 99th percentile write latency is moderately worse than the BX300's, but its 99th percentile read latency is almost twice as high.

The BX300 further improves on the power efficiency of the MX300, but not enough to match the Intel 545s that benefits both from a newer Silicon Motion controller and from newer 64L 3D NAND.