The Crucial BX300 (480GB) SSD Review: Back To MLC
by Billy Tallis on August 29, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Crucial BX300 is tied for second-fastest average data rate on The Destroyer among SATA drives. The BX300's performance falls between the Samsung 850 EVO and 850 PRO, and matches the Intel 545s that uses a newer generation of 3D NAND and a newer SSD controller.
The BX300's latency during The Destroyer is best in class, with both average and 99th percentile latencies at the top of the chart.
Breaking the average latency score down by read and write operations, we find the BX300 in second place for each subscore, but with a different drive in first place each time: the 850 PRO is what beats the BX300's average read latency, and the Crucial MX200 beats the BX300's average write latency.
The Crucial BX300 does a great job keeping read latency low throughout the destroyer, with the lowest 99th percentile read latency out of this bunch of drives. By contrast, the 99th percentile write latency only ranks third, behind the Intel 545s and Samsung 850 PRO. The MX300's 99th percentile write latency is moderately worse than the BX300's, but its 99th percentile read latency is almost twice as high.
The BX300 further improves on the power efficiency of the MX300, but not enough to match the Intel 545s that benefits both from a newer Silicon Motion controller and from newer 64L 3D NAND.
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Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
It's true, especially on sale, the 850 EVO is an incredible value for performance focused SATA shoppers. But if you are ok with 80-90% of the real world performance of an 850 EVO, you can get that from pretty much any modern SSD for much less. Various Sandisk drives (like the Ultra II) and even Mushkin drives are good performance, still use MLC, and are cheaper.m16 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
It might have a "horrible" wake up time, but that is still really fast and will probably not be an issue on anything at all.The drive seems like a steal, and the only thing that it is missing is temperature throttling available in the higher end MX series. Which is also not an issue except in higher end laptops that produce a lot of heat or really small desktops with a beast of a CPU/GPU setup and not enough ventilation.
MrCommunistGen - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I realize they're targeting the BX300 at the lower end and for lower price points, but I'd have really loved to have seen a 960GB model.Also, I'm really loving that the full-drive performance is close to the empty performance, unlike so many other recent drives on 1xnm TLC, Micron 3D TLC, and/or are DRAM-less.
damianrobertjones - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
There's a 1tb model?Wubinator - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
No there isn'thttp://www.crucial.com/usa/en/ssd/series--BX300?cm...
MrCommunistGen - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
I was trying to say that I wish Crucial had decided to make a 960GB model... but they didn't. Performance, Performance/Watt, $/GB are all great. I want a bigger drive with all those attributes.creed3020 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Great review Billy! Consistent execution on the writing and the newer format graphs are a nice refresh for the SSD review format. Keep these coming.I still wish the MX100 was in the charts to get a better grasp on the generational changes.
jabber - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
99% of Hardware review sites always make this mistake. They always ignore the hardware that most people will have i.e. the hardware from the past 2-3 years. They just always test against the stuff they had sent them 6 months previous that most still haven't bothered to upgrade to. Most of the benches have little relevance to most users wanting to know how the new stuff compares to theirs. It's really frustrating.ComputerGuy2006 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I agree, I have the Bx100 and I would be interesting in a direct comparison. Even the "ssd 2015 bench" does not have the bx300 right now so I can't compare them.Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
Lucky, the BX100 was an amazing value back in the day (hah, 2 years ago) and still holds up.