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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
90 Comments
View All Comments
MrSpadge - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
A budget drive with budget price, without any real weakness - well done!nwarawa - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Does this thing still have partial power loss protection? I don't see much in the way of capacitors in the images, at least compared to the M500 up to the MX300Ryan Smith - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
No, it does not. The BX series always omits that feature.nwarawa - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
"The BX series always omits that feature."Incorrect. The BX100 most definitely did. I even confirmed with Crucial themselves.
Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
BX100 PCB: http://www.storagereview.com/images/StorageReview-...No power loss protection.
BX series has never offered it. If Micron/Crucial said otherwise, they lied.
Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
Here is a high-res shot from AT: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9144/IMG_2266.jpgKristian seems to believe in that review there are enough caps to drive 8 NAND dies, a piece of 1.35v DDR3 DRAM, and the SMI controller, for 200us.
As an engineer, without even measuring the capacitance of the tiny inlays of that PCB, it's visually clear this is physically impossible. Just comparing to the PCB of the MX100 which has a dedicated PLP circuit and rows of caps, no matter how much power efficiency the BX100 design has over the MX100, the level of PLP is going to be entirely different, which leads me to this thread:
This thread has a good definition of "power loss protection" on the BX100: http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/Crucial-...
Basically, it's discussed that about 2-4MB of the indirection table cache (which is write-thru to the NAND by design) can be protected by the design. In other words, insignificant and irrelevant. This is why PLP was never marketed for the BX100. It's useless. Most non-enterprise implementations are.
nwarawa - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
I wouldn't call partial PLP "useless". Old SSDs wouldn't just lose SOME data. They would often lose ALL data. It would be nice to see an updated version of this test from years ago:http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html
The M4 didn't have the partial PLP, so it would be interesting to see how much of an improvement the M500 with it's partial PLP made. For that matter, some Phison S10 drives and Samsung's last few years of models mention some form of firmware based PLP... so how effective are they?
Anyone want to start a GoFundMe for this guy to run some updated tests?
nwarawa - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
Update: I reached out to lkcl to see if he's interested in continuing the testing, and if GoFundMe would work for him. I said I would chip in $10-$20 to see some updated test results. Anyone else interested in these tests?nwarawa - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
Samus, you didn't read carefully enough. It's not whether or not it has FULL power loss protection, but PARTIAL power loss protection. You can read anandtech's review of the BX100 for more information on what that entails. The very link you posted shows the little capacitors that are sufficient for the PARTIAL power loss protection. The reason this was even brought up is that there seem to be fewer of those capacitors on the BX300, which raised doubt as to if the feature was still included. I was just in a convo with Crucial directly, and they confirmed that the BX300 does indeed still have partial PLP.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
when 3D NAND was first proposed, durability was supposed to improve because such devices could/would be built on larger nm nodes. has that actually happened? what node(s) are being used for 32/64L?