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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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.