The Crucial BX200 (480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Crucial's First TLC NAND SSD
by Billy Tallis on November 3, 2015 9:00 AM ESTATTO - Transfer Size vs Performance
ATTO provides a quick and easy test of performance over a range of block sizes, which makes it a good overview of performance. It usually illustrates quite clearly how performance plateaus as transfer size increases, with reads bumping up against the limits of SATA but writes being limited by the speed of the flash itself.
Both capacities of the BX200 produce some of the oddest ATTO plots I've seen. Read performance scales up in a mostly normal fashion, but write performance is all over the place. ATTO alternates between reads and writes, so the drive was not under sustained long-term write pressure but was nevertheless wildly inconsistent. This test is pretty short, but still long enough for the BX200 to run into trouble.
AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Performance
Drives that perform transparent compression will perform much worse on this test than during the Iometer tests. The SandForce controllers that relied heavily on compression are much less popular (having been largely displaced by controllers from Silicon Motion, Marvell, and Phison), but this in still an important metric to keep in the suite. Many real-world sources of bulk data (such as encoded video) are already heavily compressed and cannot benefit from any attempts at further compression. Like the ATTO test, this is a fairly short test so it is more representative of peak performance than sustained performance.
The BX200 had no trouble on the Iometer sequential read test, so it's no surprise that it handles the AS-SSD read test well.
The BX200's write performance on this short test is not great but it is adequate. It's hard to tell whether it suffered a performance crash for a small portion of the test of if this was a case of slow-ish but steady performance and the short duration saved the drive from further embarrassment.
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zeeBomb - Sunday, November 8, 2015 - link
Less bits the better?Dahak - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
So I had primarily just skimmed the article, but for a successor to the BX100 its not.I wonder if there is some firmware bug that might be causing an issue.
I have used the BX100s fine in general office settings, but i many need to pass on these and start to look for an alternative
mczak - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Honestly I think the BX200 as a cheap SSD makes sense. The problem with the BX100 was that it was "too good". There was just about no difference in performance to the MX200 (faster in some benchmarks even), there was some feature differences (for instance no AES encryption, albeit this seems to have been an artificial firmware limitation as the controller supports it) but who cares about that in client ssds. But on the downside, there was just about no price difference to the MX200 neither, some shops selling some capacities of the BX100 actually for more than the same capacities for the MX200 sometimes. So the Crucial BX100 and MX200 were really pretty much the same in nearly all aspects.But with BX200 this changes - the MX200 now clearly is the better product, but the BX200 definitely is cheaper (or at least retail prices really need to be cheaper). Albeit the benchmarks are definitely concerning - even with tlc nand it shouldn't be THAT bad, maybe indeed the firmware is to blame.
hojnikb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Actually, TLC is pretty bad and is mostly the sole reason why this drive performs so badly. Remove the SLC cache and it would be much worse (especially on paper).mczak - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
I don't quite agree. There's other tlc nand ssds in the benchmarks. Even if you exclude the 850 Evo (with its 3d nand) there's still the (toshiba tlc nand based) ocz trion 100. And this performs quite ok - sure it's not exactly leading but it doesn't trail by huge amounts in some benchmarks like the bx200 does. I'd have expected the bx200 to perform close to that rather than a league of its own as far as slow ssds go... I don't know though if that's due to differences between toshiba tlc and micron tlc or if that's due to controllers.Drumsticks - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
It can't be *just* the NAND. The other TLC based drives in the charts perform much closer to "mainstream" than "absolutely terrible at everything"hojnikb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
its pretty hard to make good tlc. so yeah, tlc from micron simply sux. no other way around it.its no controllers fault, as it should perform just fine on its own, since its based off *46
DanNeely - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Assuming the street price does settle in at a reasonable discount to MSRP (and thus is cheaper than most other budget drives), these look like a reasonable option for office work. It look ~4 minutes of sustained full writes for the 480GB model to choke. Outside of photo/video editing the only time a normal user is going to hit that long of a sustained write is for OS or very large software installs. The rest of the time, most writes will be a few seconds at most before an idle period gives the drive time to catch up and flush the ram/SLC caches; meaning they should mostly sit in the (short) burst where the drives IO is similar to what much higher end drives achieve; and most longer operations will still fit in the middle plateau which is similar in performance to most budget drives on the market.beginner99 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Too expensive or too low performance. I think everyone can afford that $20 to step up to a MX200 or similar. And this $20 is more than worth it given the extra performance. Off topic but I would also like how older SSDs fare in these benches just as a comparison. Say I have an intel G2, will I actually gain anything noticeable from moving to a new SSD?Mangosteen - Thursday, November 5, 2015 - link
Yup! You can go to anandtechs excellent bench:http://anandtech.com/bench/SSD/65
The 2013 benchmarks include a "Intel X25-M G2 160GB" (or the 80GB) which is what I'm going to assume is an Intel G2.
You can compare 1 to 1 with any SSD for example with a 250GB 850 Evo you see big gains just about everywhere, so you will definitely gain performance but will that actually be noticeable to you i have no idea because it depends on what you will use it for. For sure it won't be AS big a gap as going from a HDD to an SSD was but you may notice some small gains. It's hilarious because in the overall listing of all the ssd's there is a "Velociraptor 10,000 rpm" HDD to compare to the SSD's which is awesome. Keep in mind also that you get a new (probably better) warranty and a larger guaranteed durability.