Crucial MX100 (256GB & 512GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on June 2, 2014 3:00 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2011
Back in 2011 (which seems like so long ago now!), we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on peak IO performance and basic garbage collection routines. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. Our thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives. The full description of the Heavy test can be found here, while the Light workload details are here.
In our Heavy workload trace, the story changes. Now the 256GB M550 is faster than the 256GB MX100 but the 512GB MX100 still leads the Crucial pack. I'm thinking that the 256GB M550 is more optimized for non-steady-state operation as that's more common for client workloads, which would explain why it performs poorly in the 2013 bench but is better in the 2011 Heavy test. What's surprising is that the 256GB MX100 is much faster than the 256GB SP920 despite that fact that the only difference between them should be the NAND lithography. Maybe Micron/Crucial didn't give ADATA the highest performing firmware after all.
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blanarahul - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
Crucial sucks balls at making performance drives.. They should leave that market to Sandforce and Samsung, and concentrate on beating Samsung in value SSD market...hojnikb - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
Sandforce makes performance drives ?!hahahah thats new :)
MrSpadge - Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - link
Please read the article.SmilingTornado - Thursday, June 5, 2014 - link
I am pretty sure this would be a "budget" SSD because of the $110 price tag and the fact that TigerDirect would be selling it for as little as $100 if you get a coupondanwat1234 - Monday, January 26, 2015 - link
No need for more performance than sandforce 2xxx, that pretty much eliminates the hard drive bottleneck completely for most uses in home computersEricZBA - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
Already instock at Amazon. Sweet! http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-MX100-adapter-Intern...Hrel - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
"Sequential Write 150MB/s 330MB/s"Why so slow? Especially when $100 drives get 550MB/s at 95k IOPS.
hojnikb - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
Where do you have 100$ drive, that gets 550MB/ write ?!extide - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
This is explained in the article... But it is because it uses fewer large capacity NAND dies to hit the low prices. For fast writed with NAND you need lots of dies, which is why the bigger versions of this drive see better performance.hojnikb - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
And competitors are using nasty tricks like turbowrite or compression to achive such write speeds. But actual nand inside those mainstream drives isn't capable of such speeds.