The Crucial BX300 (480GB) SSD Review: Back To MLC
by Billy Tallis on August 29, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Crucial SSDs occupy the bottom half of the average data rate rankings for the Light test, as the other 3D NAND SSDs in this bunch are able to deliver higher peak performance. The BX300 is slower than the MX300 when the test is run on an empty drive, but for a full drive the BX300 is the fastest Crucial SSD and also faster than the ADATA SU800.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores for the BX300 are worse than the other 3D NAND SSDs in this comparison, but there's enough of a gap for it to matter.
The average read latency of the Crucial BX300 on the Light test is better than any other Crucial drive, but is unimpressive compared to the 3D NAND SSDs from other brands. The average write latency is significantly higher than most of the other SSDs (excepting the BX200), but is not enough to cause real problems for light workloads.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies tell pretty much the same story as the averages for the BX300: it performs fine for read operations, but is a bit slower for writes.
The Crucial BX300 turns in another second-place score for power efficiency, behind the MX300. The Light test doesn't put too much stress on the MX300's SLC caching, so it keeps its first-place efficiency even when the test is run on a full drive.
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Billy Tallis - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
The 545s uses 64-layer 3D TLC, while the BX300's MLC is still the first-generation 32-layer NAND. Clearly, the Intel/Micron 64L 3D NAND improves on more than just layer count. That a big part of why I suspect the BX300 may be short-lived and soon replaced by a 64L TLC product.Naris17 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Great review. I've always had a soft spot for Micron. Does the BX300 contain partial power loss protection capacitors like the MX300, or are those taken out?BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
There are some images at the bottom of the first page of the review that show the disassembled drive case and the PCB inside. It doesn't look like power loss protection is possible given the small size of the surface mount capacitors that are present.vladx - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
BX series always lacked PLP, that's why it was considered lower-tier while performance was not far away.nwarawa - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Incorrect. The BX100 most definitely did. I even confirmed with Crucial themselves.nwarawa - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
In fact, you can even look at Anandtech's earlier review of the BX100 if you don't believe me:http://www.anandtech.com/show/9144/crucial-bx100-1...
nwarawa - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
I was just in a chat with Crucial directly: they say the BX300 does indeed have partial power-loss protection.Glock24 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Finally something worth buying besides the 850Evo, but only of they keep the prices low.vladx - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
There are a lot of good alternatives to 850 EVO, most of the times the slightly higher performance is not worth the premium.Glock24 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Can you list them? All other drives are notably slower while costing as much as the 850 Evo, others are even more expensive.This BX300 performs very close to the 850 Evo while being slightly cheaper (although smaller capacity too).