The Crucial BX300 (480GB) SSD Review: Back To MLC
by Billy Tallis on August 29, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
When the Heavy test is run on an empty drive, the Crucial BX300's average data rate is not quite as fast as the drives using Micron's 3D TLC with large SLC caches. The situation is very different when the test is run on a full drive: the ADATA SU800 and Crucial MX300 are far slower, while the Crucial BX300 retains almost all of its performance and ends up placing right behind the Samsung 850 PRO and EVO.
The average latency and 99th percentile latency of the BX300 on the Heavy test are slower than most of the other drives in this bunch except the BX200. It is again very clear that the Micron 3D TLC drives have serious problems when the drive is full, but the BX300 handles that situation fine.
The average read latency of the BX300 is faster than the Crucial MX drives and the Intel 545s, while the BX300's average write latency is slower than those, though not to a worrying degree. Samsung comes out ahead for both reads and writes, though the ADATA SU800 is competitive provided the test isn't run on a full drive.
The 99th percentile read latency of the Crucial BX300 is a bit slower than the Samsung 850 PRO but clearly faster than any other Crucial drive and is also ahead of the Samsung 850 EVO. The 99th percentile write latency of the BX300 is about twice as high as most of its competition, though when full the MX300 and ADATA SU800 show even higher latency.
The Crucial BX300 is tied for second place with the Samsung 850 EVO for power efficiency on the Heavy test. The MX300 uses substantially less power when the test is run on an empty drive, but significantly more power when the test is run on a full drive.
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Ryan Smith - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
We're still finalizing that for the new testbed.plopke - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Quiet impressed by the improvements , nice surprise. But why would anyone still get a mx300 <525GB capacity. Am I missing something here? Crucial always confuses me with what they want the MX vs BX to be.Or would they discontinue MX 300 <525GB , now I am curious if they will be making a MX400 still this year.
wallysb01 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Why get <525? Because its still $90 or $60 less in total cost and if you don't need >120 or 240 GB, why not save the money. Plenty of use-cases don't need much more than just enough to boot a computer.vladx - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
So MX300 is using TLC NAND while BX300 is now MLC? What the hell is going on with Micron/Crucial's marketing team?MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
To be fair to Micron/Crucial, it seems like par for the course for marketing teams to confuse peoplemelgross - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Most people don’t care. They look at capacity, price, and maybe, performance. How the company gets there isn’t important.Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
The ideal solution to market a product is to take a draft description from the designers, engineers, etc, and condense it to a slogan and a product segment that is palatable to the general population.The problem seems to be the inability for marketing departments and advertising companies to adapt ideas and technology without loosing the core functions of those ideas and technology.
As you said, a lot of them just focus on price or "what works" (as in, keeping with the previous naming conventions, even if they never worked in the first place...because changing it now would admit defeat)
Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
I've been saying this about AMD and even Intel's marketing teams for years. And who can forget NVidia's GTX 970 memory configuration flop?The fundamental problems seems to be nobody with any engineering mentality is on a marketing team. Which is a shame, because as an engineer, I firmly believe we are good at selling (ourselves and our ideas) to management on a daily basis. And the morons in management think just like the morons in marketing.
msabercr - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Are we sure this is MLC? It seems an aweful lot like the intel 545s which is TLC.Ian Cutress - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Yes, we are sure.