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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
90 Comments
View All Comments
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).