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 - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of heavy desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this review. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The BX100's performance on The Destroyer isn't dead last, but it underperforms for its capacity.
Average service time is startlingly high and is close to a hard drive's seek time.
The frequency of performance outliers is in line with the other two low performers on this test, indicating that the BX200's performance doesn't stutter any more often, but it pauses for longer periods of time when it does stutter.
Higher power consumption is to be expected from a drive using TLC NAND, but the BX200 consumed more than twice the energy over the duration of The Destroyer than any of the other drives, and more than five times as much as the BX100. The BX200 didn't take vastly more time to complete The Destroyer, so it was clearly not making good use of idle time.
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redzo - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
It's a disaster. I think that Crucial was better of not releasing the damn thing. What were they thinking? The performance gap is huge compared to samsung's evo. This product just shows that samsung rules TLC. All educated buyers will think twice before purchasing it even at 15/20$ lower than this.KAlmquist - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
What makes it a disaster is that Crucial is replacing a successful product (the BX100) with this thing. Keep the BX100 around, give the new drive a designation like AX100, market it as a budget alternative to the BX100, and the drive might be a modest success.When the BX100 disappears, that will leave the Samsung 850 EVO as the paradigm of the SATA SSD sweet spot, with good balance of performance, quality, and attractive pricing.
paulgj - Monday, November 9, 2015 - link
They should name it the BX50 :-)tabascosauz - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
The BX200 should be compared to the SP550 from ADATA. Both are budget drives, both SM2256 (which has left a much crappier first impression than the actually promising SM2246EN), both TLC, yet the SP550 does better as a budget drive.KAlmquist - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Yup. I would be excited about the performance of the BX200 if I worked for ADATA.Dritman - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
This is actually embarrassing, to put this product into today's market, at any price. You cannot step backwards THIS far.A crap review is like one of the cheap OCZ drives, except they're understandably bad, because they're so cheap and kinda in line with the price.
With this thing though, it's much worse than anyone could have imagined.
bennyg - Tuesday, November 10, 2015 - link
80mb/s sequential write is not that bad in a SSD. If it were made in 2009.TonyCL6 - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
The comparison chart should add Samsung 840EVO (planer 19nm TLC) and ADATA SP550 (planer Hynix 16nm TLC) to be more meaningful. It helps users understand the sustain Seq. write (after pSLC cache ran out) performance differences between planer TLC of Samsung 19nm, Toshiba 19nm, Hynix 16nm and Micron 16nm.Kutark - Sunday, November 15, 2015 - link
Can someone answer a question for me. It says these are capable of roughly 500MB/s read and write, however SATA3 obviously saturates around 200. Are those figures for m.2 PCIE versions of the drive or? Cus I see them advertised for the 2.5" SATA drives and im a little confused.I was about to build a skylake setup as a Christmas gift to myself, however I was looking at some of the NVMe drives etc, to get better perf than SATA3 can offer, however, they're significantly more expensive per GB. So, if I can get something with a sustained 500 read/write like this, (or maybe a "pro" version, i.e. non NVME) I'd rather save the money, as realistically in a gamer situation the difference between 500mb/s and 1000 is gonna be negligible.
NJCompguy - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
Despite the abysmal performance of this drive, it's still light years faster then a 5400RPM mechanical drive. I picked up this drive (240GB version) for $65.00 - it made my friends laptop feel brand new after installing a fresh copy of Windows 10. She could not have been happier with this drive. People to often get caught up in the technical details and lose sight of the "big picture" of upgrading from a slow hard drive to an SSD. This drive is perfect for those that just want a laptop to boot up quicker.