The Crucial BX200 (480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Crucial's First TLC NAND SSD
by Billy Tallis on November 3, 2015 9:00 AM ESTSequential Read Performance
Just like the random read test, sequential reads are tested across the span of a full drive and a representative sample of queue depths. This test performs 128kB reads. Most operations involving large files (typically images and videos) fall under this test's purveiw, but streaming or playing even the highest resolution videos doesn't require anywhere near the full bandwidth of a SSD. Copying files to another SSD or loading very large files into an editing program will more likely use all the speed that's available.
At last we see respectable performance from the BX200. Its sequential read speeds aren'te quite up to the SATA limit at low queue depths, but it can sustain solid performance. Unfortunately, for anyone holding out hope that the poor results we've seen so far may be a testbed issue, the otherwise respectable sequential performance puts that idea to rest.
Power consumption on sequential reads is actually good, though it won't catch up with the best of drives.
Default |
Given a larger queue depth, the BX200 is actually able to reach the performance plateau of the SATA speed limit; it just takes a little longer than the top tier of drives. Given the performance, it's not surprising to see that power consumption doesn't grow much. The shallow but steady decline in power consumption for the 480GB drive may be a sign that it's able to do some prefetching and caching to reduce the number of times it has to read from the flash.
Sequential Write Performance
The sequential write isn't limited to a small span of the disk, as that usually doesn't make a difference for this performance metric. As always, our averages are of the lower queue depths, but scaling to higher queue depths is also investigated. Bulk file copies and recording uncompressed video are the kind of uses that depend on sequential write performance.
The initial good news we saw with the BX200's sequential read performance didn't last long. The drive's write performance is bad for sequential access just like random access, unfortunately displacing the Trion 100 as one of the worst drives in our current collection.
The BX200 power consumption during sequential writing is poor but not radically so. It would seem that Micron's TLC flash requires at most a little more power to write to than other TLC, and this drive is just wasting most of that power budget on background management.
Default |
Looking at larger queue depths, performance drops slightly after QD1, and stays low as power consumption shifts around some but is always high. Neither capacity of the BX100 can sustain even 100MB/s of writes for a length of time.
85 Comments
View All Comments
extide - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
You guys made a typo on page 8, under "Mixed Sequential Read/Write Performance" -- you duplicated "duplicating" hehBilly Tallis - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Ironic. Thanks.NeonFlak - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
1tb Mushkin Reactor for less than $300 any day over this.MikhailT - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Is it me or is Crucial messing up lately with regressed successors? MX100 was great but MX200 was not that great and BX100/BX200 is even worse. It would've been better for them to just keep MX100 and drop prices over time.Crucial is basically just convincing me to switch to Samsung next time.
leexgx - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
BX100 was very good for laptops, very low power use even when under loadBX200 is slower and use crap load more power , the TLC drives are just not worth the £10 cheaper price
LarsBars - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
I've heard AnandTech say in the past, "It doesn't matter which brand of SSD you go with- just that you go with SSD."It looks like the BX200 means we need to be more vigilant about which SSDs we buy.
JimmiG - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
It wouldn't be terrible if it was a bit cheaper. If the price drops over the next couple of months (which usually happens with SSD's), it would be great as a "secondary SSD", especially the 960GB model. However at the current prices, you're better off paying a tiny bit more for much better performance and endurance.Hulk - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
I don't understand. Same endurance as the BX100 series using the same process size yet this is TLC vs. MLC for the BX100?While the performance is not great I could see this for media storage if the price is right. And by right I mean $200/TB.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
The endurance ratings for warranty purposes are only loosely connected to the actual P/E cycle count, and are usually pretty conservative. Plus, the BX200 does have the benefit of more sophisticated error correction.jabber - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Time to buy up the clearance BX100s!