The Crucial BX200 (480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Crucial's First TLC NAND SSD
by Billy Tallis on November 3, 2015 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionately more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance should never drop all the way down to the steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here.
The higher proportion of writes on the Heavy test as compared with The Destroyer sends the BX200 to the bottom of the chart. The difference in performance between running the Heavy test on a freshly-erased drive and a completely full drive is atypically small, showing that the poor performance cannot be due to a mere lack of sufficient overprovisioning.
Until the BX200 came along, there wasn't much spread among SATA drive for average service time. The painful write performance shows up very clearly here.
With 8.8% and 10.7% of operations taking more than 10ms to complete, the BX200 will clearly be noticeably slower than most modern SSDs under moderate and heavy load.
Power consumption is once again dismal, as the drive is apparently spending way too much of its time on its relatively ineffective garbage collection.
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paulgj - Monday, November 9, 2015 - link
I just ordered a couple more BX100's 250GBdoggface - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
The MX100 was just brilliant, an easy recommendation.The BX100 has been my go to value SSD, that l I recommended to many friends. The bx200 is garbage which costs more? And is about as bad as a HDD. What the hell crucial. What the hell.Luke212 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
BX100 and MX100 were great.... how can they go backward so badly?JDG1980 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
It's looking more and more as though TLC is a big flop. It doesn't seem to provide substantial price savings, and it comes at a considerable cost in performance, durability, and reliability.For a TLC drive to be worth it, it would need to be 1/2 to 1/4 the cost per gigabyte of a MLC solution on the largest drives. It then might be acceptable for people who want moderately priced bulk storage that's cheaper than standard SSDs. But that's not close to being the case now, and it may never be.
CiccioB - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
Yeah, I still wonder if TLC is really reliable as producers advertise them.Samsung needed a "hack" to their 840 TLC series to solve data retention problems reducing life time.
We do not know if others have done the same without (obviously) telling publicly. And if 850 series has it under the hood.
I would go to MLC drives for few $ more. I feel them as more reliable and durable. And "feeling" is an important thing for me, as I put my data on them and saving few bucks may not really be an advantage when a TLC drive lives less then a MLC one.
For performance, I bet anyone to be able to discern differences in real life form an SSD to another. This are "synthetic" tests, where source of data is faster than SSD speed (RAM). For whatever real usage, anything comes from sources that are slower (HDD, network, optical disks). Load times into RAM is limited, as you don't usually load GB and GB into it but during a benchmark.
What it really matters is reliability, durability and price. TLC fails to make me comfortable with the first two criteria. Which, for me, are the most important ones.
CiccioB - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
"This are "synthetic" tests"These are synthetic tests.
Edit button, please!
extide - Thursday, November 5, 2015 - link
Yeah it seems like you really need to go to 3D NAND to get decent TLC -- the 850 EVO's have so far been pretty much great. That significantly larger feature size really helps the TLC out.Beaver M. - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
No wonder I have been skipping reviews of new SATA SSDs for a few years now. Nothing can touch the Samsung ones, and thats sad.ghanz - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
Review request: Please do a review of Sandisk Plus, their current lowest tier SSDs available in 120gb and 240gb capacities.Will be interesting to see how those compares to the BX100 and BX200 in similar capacities.
Mugur - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
I must buy another BX100 until the stocks will dry...