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
Performance Consistency
We've been looking at performance consistency since the Intel SSD DC S3700 review in late 2012 and it has become one of the cornerstones of our SSD reviews. Back in the days many SSD vendors were only focusing on high peak performance, which unfortunately came at the cost of sustained performance. In other words, the drives would push high IOPS in certain synthetic scenarios to provide nice marketing numbers, but as soon as you pushed the drive for more than a few minutes you could easily run into hiccups caused by poor performance consistency.
Once we started exploring IO consistency, nearly all SSD manufacturers made a move to improve consistency and for the 2015 suite, I haven't made any significant changes to the methodology we use to test IO consistency. The biggest change is the move from VDBench to Iometer 1.1.0 as the benchmarking software and I've also extended the test from 2000 seconds to a full hour to ensure that all drives hit steady-state during the test.
For better readability, I now provide bar graphs with the first one being an average IOPS of the last 400 seconds and the second graph displaying the IOPS divided by standard deviation during the same period. Average IOPS provides a quick look into overall performance, but it can easily hide bad consistency, so looking at standard deviation is necessary for a complete look into consistency.
I'm still providing the same scatter graphs too, of course. However, I decided to dump the logarithmic graphs and go linear-only since logarithmic graphs aren't as accurate and can be hard to interpret for those who aren't familiar with them. I provide two graphs: one that includes the whole duration of the test and another that focuses on the last 400 seconds of the test to get a better scope into steady-state performance.
It looks like Crucial has finally taken steps to improve steady-state performance, although the additional over-provisioning is partially to thank for the increase. One criticism I always had about Crucial's SSDs was the relatively bad steady-state performance, but the MX200 finally brings the performance closer to other high-end drives.
The consistency is very good as well and far better than what the BX100 offers.
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The IO consistency appears to behave differently from the MX100 and the graph resembles 850 EVO and Pro quite a bit by dropping quickly in performance and then slowly increasing before evening out. The 1TB model is an exception, though, as it seems that the firmware can't properly handle such a large capacity, which results in worse performance and considerably higher variation. Unfortunately, the MX200 wouldn't respond to the hdparm command that I use for over-provisioning testing, so I don't have any results with added over-provisioning at this point.
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RAMdiskSeeker - Sunday, May 24, 2015 - link
Would you be able to re-run and publish the benchmarks for the MX200 250GB drive formatted as a 100GB drive so that it runs entirely in SLC mode?jihe - Monday, May 25, 2015 - link
No way would I recommend Samsung to anyone. Selling TLC for the price of MLC? Massive lost of performance?pseudoid - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
Thank you for yet another great SSD review.I am from the old-skool camp when eeking out performance from drives meant the only alternative was SCSI drives spinning at 10k RPM and when SCSI cables cost more than the current 128GB SSDs. I gradually stepped up to VelociRaptor HDDs that were the only performance champs leaving behind SCSI HDDs and waiting for SSDs to get to affordable range. Yet those VelociRaptors are refusing to die in my system after all these years.
A few years ago, I finally broke down and bought a Patriot Pyro 240GB as my current Win8.1Pro OS boot drive (all user data are directed to the older VelociRaptors to afford longevity to the Patriot Pyro).
I use a utility called SSDLifePro (http://ssd-life.com) to periodically monitor the performance of my Patriot Pyro. It currently tells me the following info:
READs = 27TB >> WRITEs = 15TB
Energized Time = 23,635Hours (2yrs, 8mos,14days)
Power Cycles = 609 times
Estimated Lifetime = 6yrs, 11mos >> End Of Life = April 2022
No, the above info is not for neener-neener, but strictly as a pre-amble to the following question:
Why are Patriot (Ignite series) SSDs never discussed (or reviewed) in AnandTech?
Ditto for Intel SSDs??
NvidiaWins - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
Crucial made the list of failing SSD's drives last week-read- http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-st...
NvidiaWins - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
Smart people buy Intel, Intel SSD's don't fail, ever.You see that Intel is considered the only reliable SSD manufacturer-
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-st...
Arkadius - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Can You retest MX200 250GB with new firmware MU02?MU02 Crucial MX200 SSD (all form factors)
Release Date: 07/14/2015
Improved Read Performance on small address spans
Improved Random Write performance on transfers not aligned to 4KB address boundaries
Improved Acceleration Capacity Recovery after TRIM and SANITIZE commands
Added Informative SMART thresholds for Attributes 202 and 5
Added Support for READ DMA BUFFER, WRITE DMA BUFFER, and DOWNLOAD MICROCODE DMA Commands
Bug Fixes and Stability Improvements
http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/support-ssd-firmware
Resental - Sunday, December 27, 2015 - link
Quote, I just bought a MX200 250GB, I have obtained much better results then those in this article, maybe they solved with latest firmware.Scott.deagan - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
I just purchased a Crucial MX200 500GB for my Dell M3800 laptop (Ubuntu edition). I need drive encryption for work. Have only been using it for a day so far, but am loving it. I'm not that fussed about performance issues between different SSD drives, all I know is this SSD is so much faster than the spin drive that came with the M3800. It feels like a new machine.Thanks for the review. Very informative. I'll check out the 850 EVO for my personal laptop.
drSeehas - Saturday, October 17, 2015 - link
"DRAM (DDR3-1600) 512 MB" for the 250 GB drive. Are you sure?Firedrops - Saturday, February 13, 2016 - link
Please show us actual capacity on storage device reviews! These things vary too much from manufacturer to manufacturer, a drive labeled 480gb is often easily over 20gb smaller than one labeled 512gb in true capacity.