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
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!