Idle Power Consumption

Many SATA drives are getting close to the limits of what our equipment can measure for power consumption. It's hard to build a meter than has sub-milliwatt accuracy and can withstand the high peak currents drawn by devices like high-performance PCIe drives. Our test rig can't measure the deepest power saving modes (DevSlp), but we can look for any red flags that the intermediate modes aren't working.

Idle Power Consumption (HIPM+DIPM)

The BX200 joins the club of drives than are very poor at managing power without DevSlp support. Its active power consumption and poor efficiency are enough to exclude it from being useful for laptops, so idle power isn't as important, but it's another disapointment.

TRIM Validation

A drive that didn't correctly implement the ATA TRIM command would be very surprising to find today, but it's a quick enough check. The trimcheck tool creates and then deletes a file on the disk, and later checks if the contents of the file are still accessible. In addition to verifying that TRIM is working correctly, this test also demonstrates that, for better or worse, files that are deleted cannot be easily recovered.

Nothing about the drive is completely broken, and TRIM does indeed work.

ATTO & AS-SSD Final Words
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  • paulgj - Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - link

    I see the MU02 firmware for this drive is out, are there any plans to retest?
  • LarsBars - Tuesday, February 2, 2016 - link

    The BX200's are getting cheap now, and they have a new firmware update, MU02. Any chance that you could re-run the BX200's through the tests and see if anything is improved? Thanks!
  • Amoro - Monday, April 11, 2016 - link

    I don't see the point since it only states stability/reliability improvements and doesn't mention anything about performance.

    Release Date: 1/12/2016

    Corrected SMART attribute threshold values
    Improved general reliability and stability
    Minor Bug Fixes and general reliability and stability Improvements
  • freddell - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link

    I dont know how your IO tests throughput numbers are so high compared to MX100 or MX200. As soon as I tried to clone a 1TB drive for my wifes laptop the write speed dropped to 60 MB/s or less, clearly slower than the HDD it was meant to replace. BX is a truly horrible drive for write performance, I will not recommend to anyone. I dont know why it was not highlighted in your review.
  • dh33r4j - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link

    I got the 480GB for £73 ($95) during lightning sale from Amazon. When the price is right, I think it becomes worth it. For someone moving from a HDD to SSD, I coudn't say no to the offer.

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