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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extide - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
So, apparently the first "bad" crucial SSD. Oh wait, no, the second one, remember that V4 or whatever it was, heh.hojnikb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
This is miles ahead V4, because this is usable, while V4 was not.iLovefloss - Sunday, November 8, 2015 - link
Nah, Crucial still had their M4 which quite a few issues for many people.Glock24 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Wow, didn't expect such a product from Crucial. The only other SSD that performs worse than a mechanical disk is the Kingston SSD V300 that is still being sold.hojnikb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
V300, despite its hate, is still *much* faster than any HDD out there.Glock24 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Maybe you got lucky, but I bought one after reading some good reviews (before the nand change fiasco hit the news) and after a while I noticed something was wrong because of the painfully slow performance. It was giving me reads close to 100MB/s and writes on the 20MB/s range, and that's sequential performance. I usually do not notice any difference in tel world performance between different SSD models, but with the V300 was very notorious. Even the HDD I had in use at the time felt faster (Spinpoint F1 1TB). So no, the V300 is not faster than any HDD.hojnikb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
that was a faulty model or issue on your end. eve the crappiest models were good for atleast 75mbs of write....Gigaplex - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
And most hard drives these days can beat 75MB/s sequential write.hojnikb - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
sequential speeds matter very little, its the random performace that makes ssds fast. and those are orders of magnitude better, even with v300jabber - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Yeah I use V300's exclusively in SATA II based PCs and laptops as they will push 270MBps+ all day long. No point buying 850 EVOs there. Must have bought 50+ and all of them are still going strong.