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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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.