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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khon - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I don't get the point of this product. If you care enough of performance to get MLC NAND rather than TLC NAND, why would you get a SATA SSD ?bill.rookard - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Sometimes it's just form factor. You may have a laptop that only has regular SATA SSD's or are upgrading to a SSD from a spinny-disk (which are decidedly awful in laptops). Or - perhaps you have a NAS or server which uses 2.5" SATA drives, or a desktop that doesn't have an M.2 slot.There are lots of reasons to have a SATA option.
nathanddrews - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
True. I have a couple pre-NVME computers that need an upgrade, so that's why I go SATA.eek2121 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
1) Buy M.2 adapter card.2) Use clover to boot from NVME
3) ???
4) PROFIT!!!
Alexvrb - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
The cheapest and easiest way to upgrade a conventional SATA-equipped system to an SSD is with a SATA SSD. Also M.2 is a form factor, not an interface. A lot of the entry-level / affordable M.2 drives are SATA-based. The added costs and complexities to get something substantially faster than SATA might not be worth it. Meanwhile a sub-$100 Evo drive can help revive an older system for cheap, it's the same price as competing products and it's somewhat better.Also, if you're talking about using Clover/Tianocore with a legacy non-UEFI bios, it's kind of a mild nuisance. Especially if you're doing it for someone else on a budget. Plus you still need to use the existing mechanical clunker SATA drive (well you could add a USB stick I guess) for the BIOS to boot and load Tianocore.
Last but not least if you're talking about an older laptop, you might very well be stuck with SATA or mSATA. So might as well make the most of it. There are a lot of OEM systems with decent enough processors, saddled with horribly slow HDDs. Easy and cheap way to rev them up.
leexgx - Saturday, September 2, 2017 - link
he thinks the laptop is a PC :PMajGenRelativity - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
People also have concerns about life expectancy of their hard drives. As far as performance, SATA is still cheaper than PCIe, so cost plays a factor as well.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Although I'll probably NEVER hit an endrance wall with TLC NAND, since the prices for TLC and MLC in are disturbingly close at this point, I see no reason not to purchase MLC. In fact, I just bought two 240GB and one 480GB SATA SSD two weeks ago and all of them were 3D MLC because there was no difference in price. I think it might be more reasonable to ask why anyone would bother with TLC in SATA or any other form factor given the current state of the market.littlebitstrouds - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Really it's quite easy... If MLC is better for endurance, and we can't find SLC anymore, without going full enterprise, anyone who engineers systems for stability will inevitably take a MLC nand storage device over a TLC, all other parts being equal. Just because you can't see a reason, doesn't mean there isn't a market for it. I guarantee you don't understand every aspect of every engineering problem that exists, which means you may not understand why a company, with shareholders, would devise such a product.sonny73n - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Seriously, you said it's easy to see the reason why but you kept ranting on without giving us a reason why they keep producing TLC and selling them at the same price with MLC.