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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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...