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 - Heavy
While The Destroyer focuses on sustained and worst-case performance by hammering the drive with nearly 1TB worth of writes, the Heavy trace provides a more typical enthusiast and power user workload. By writing less to the drive, the Heavy trace doesn't drive the SSD into steady-state and thus the trace gives us a good idea of peak performance combined with some basic garbage collection routines. For full details of the test, please refer to the this article.
In our Heavy trace the MX200 is an average drive: it's not as fast as Samsung drives, but roughly on par with the BX100. The most notable data point is the 250GB MX200 in full state because the drop in performance is tremendous, which is due to Dynamic Write Acceleration that is only enabled on the 250GB model. Because DWA writes everything to the SLC cache first, the drive constantly needs to migrate data from SLC to MLC, adding a significant amount of overhead and reducing the performance of host IOs.
The latencies are also good, except for the full 250GB MX200.
Power consumption under load is decent, but not BX100 level. The advantage over Samsung drives is notable, though, so the MX200 appears to be a pretty good fit for a laptop.
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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.