Crucial MX200 (250GB, 500GB & 1TB) SSD Review
by Kristian Vättö on May 22, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Crucial
- MX200
- Micron 16nm
AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer has been an essential part of our SSD test suite for nearly two years now. It was crafted to provide a benchmark for very IO intensive workloads, which is where you most often notice the difference between drives. It's not necessarily the most relevant test to an average user, but for anyone with a heavier IO workload The Destroyer should do a good job at characterizing performance. For full details of this test, please refer to this article.
Despite the improved IO consistency, the MX200 doesn't have any advantage over the MX100 in our heaviest The Destroyer trace. The MX200 is clearly not crafted for intensive IO workloads because there are far better drives available, which is a shame because I've been waiting for Crucial to deliver a true high-end drive, but the MX200 clearly isn't that. What's alarming is the fact that the BX100 is actually faster than the MX200, which doesn't speak too highly of Crucial-Micron's custom firmware for the Marvell controller.
Average latency doesn't really change the story as the MX200 is still a relatively slow drive by today's high-end SSD standards. Especially the performance of the 250GB is surprisingly bad and it looks like Crucial's SLC cache implementation isn't optimal for intensive IO workloads.
The share of high latency IOs is also pretty bad, although fortunately even the 250GB model manages to keep +100ms IOs within a reasonable limit.
The power consumption is quite average, but the BX100 is without a doubt far more power efficient even for high intensity IO workloads despite its position as a value drive.
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beginner99 - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
SSD market has becoming just as boring as CPU. Time for new chipste and NVMe drives which will finally deliver an actual improvement. However for clients, it doesn't really matter...even my intel G2 was good enough.JackF - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
I continue to be happy with my 1TB Samsung EVO drive. For $359, it is/was a good value, and consistently performs high on these comparison charts.Just out of curiosity, why is the Mushkin Reactor not included on any of the comparison charts? When I was considering an upgrade, it was at the top of my list, but you never include it in the comparison charts. You gave it a Anandtech recommendation back in February?
Teknobug - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Sounds like what Kingston did with the SSDNow series, older SSDNow drives were fast but the newer ones are ridiculously slow, so now the same with Crucial?MrSpadge - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
Take another look at the BX100 - that's a really good value drive and anything but slow.jabber - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
The Kingston SSDs are great value as they are usually the cheapest SSDs on Amazon etc. And in most cases are probably being used to upgrade SATA II equipped hardware. In which case they will push 260MBps all day long. Seen many labour for days over SSD specs and reviews when in fact the machine they want to upgrade doesn't have SATA III.der - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Crucial for CRUCIAL performance. Eek!eanazag - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
In the SSD market I only see excitement in PCIe/NVMe designs. I believe there is a place for SATA drives, but the differentiation needs to innovative; i.e. beyond performance. Warranty, reliability, consistency, software tools, and RAID support are areas for differentiation.After looking at the value & mainstream performance products in the chart the Samsung Evo is a compelling product. Crucial's BX line is a price undercutting product compared to the Evo and it doesn't do that. I say this because the BX feature set is sub-par to the Evo. The MX is the Evo's direct competitor.
KaarlisK - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
I do not get TRIM validation. There was never doubt that TRIM works in the sense that they LBAs contain zeroes. The question always was whether TRIMming a drive would restore degraded performance. And for some drives, it would not.Why isn't this verified any more? Or have I missed something?
creed3020 - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Thanks so much for the review Kristian. Now I can finally compare this in Bench to others drives when making recommendations for clients.zodiacfml - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Price and warranty. Anyway, it is just getting more difficult to compete with Samsung which is the case and it will just get worse.