Crucial BX100 (120GB, 250GB, 500GB & 1TB) SSD Review
by Kristian Vättö on April 10, 2015 1:20 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Crucial
- Micron
- Silicon Motion
- BX100
- SM2246EN
- Micron 16nm
Final Words
The MX100 was a revolutionary product in many ways. It was the first drive to move to sub-19nm NAND, which brought cost savings along with it. The combination of price and performance made the MX100 arguably one of the most cost efficient drives on the market. The BX100 is more of an evolutionary step from the MX100 as it uses the same 16nm MLC as its foundation, but the switch from a Marvell to a Silicon Motion controller has allowed Crucial to cut the costs by another few percent, while still retaining high performance in typical client workloads.
Talking about performance, the BX100 is a great all-around performer. It performs well regardless of the workload and despite not being designed for IO intensive workloads such as The Destroyer benchmark, the higher capacities (500GB & 1TB) manage to be very close to the higher-end drives. It actually begs a question of whether it's worth it to pay the premium for a high-end drive because in reality you will only be gaining about 10-15% higher performance, whereas the cost premium is much more than that. For professionals who truly need the best IO performance, the premium can be worth it (although you should really be looking at PCIe SSDs already), but for enthusiasts it's safe to say that the BX100 delivers far more bang for the buck than a high-end SSD does (unless you're looking for a 256GB drive or smaller).
Furthermore, the BX100 is extremely power efficient and without a doubt the best drive in terms of power consumption that we have tested. For desktop users that isn't a big deal (unless you pay very close attention to your power bill), but for laptop users I would argue that power consumption is just as important as performance is (if not even more important) because increased battery life is something concrete and easily noticeable.
My only criticism is the fact that Crucial decided not to include TCG Opal and eDrive encryption in the BX100. Like I mentioned on the first page, I understand that the reason behind the move is to differentiate the BX100 and MX200, but it's still a feature that we got accustomed to in Crucial SSDs. I can't say this is a major issue because hardware encryption in the client space is still in its infancy and the software support is poor, but nevertheless it's a feature that I would have liked to see included.
| Amazon Price Comparison (4/10/2015) | ||||
| 120/128GB | 240/250/256GB | 480/500/512GB | 960GB/1TB | |
| Crucial BX100 | $68 | $99 | $185 | $375 |
| Crucial MX200 | - | $110 | $200 | $430 |
| OCZ ARC 100 | $60 | $105 | $170 | - |
| Crucial MX100 | $72 | $110 | $210 | - |
| Intel SSD 530 | $89 | $133 | $245 | - |
| Mushkin Reactor | - | - | - | $371 |
| Samsung SSD 850 EVO | $65 | $107 | $190 | $380 |
| Samsung SSD 850 Pro | $100 | $155 | $290 | $500 |
| SanDisk Ultra II | $70 | $95 | $180 | $360 |
| SanDisk Extreme Pro | - | $146 | $285 | $475 |
| Transcend SSD370 | $58 | $99 | $176 | $360 |
Given that the MX100 was already driving prices down, it comes as no surprise that the BX100 is very competitive in price. The Ultra II and SSD370 are slightly cheaper, but neither of them can provide the same combination of performance and power efficiency as the BX100 does. On that basis I would pick the BX100 over the two since the price delta is rather insignificant anyway (and obviously, pricing fluctuates on a daily and retailer basis). The 850 EVO is also very close in price and offers a little higher performance, but it can't challenge the BX100 in power efficiency, so for mobile users my recommendation would be the BX100, whereas the 850 EVO does offer marginally better value for desktop users.
In a nutshell, I have nothing but positive things to say about the BX100 for its price point, especially when it comes to the higher capacities. The performance is good for all workloads, the power efficiency is top of the class and most importantly, the overall value you get is simply outstanding. If you are on the market for an SSD right now, especially for laptop, I would highly recommend the BX100 even if your workload happens to be heavier than average.
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mczak - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link
Note though the M500, M550 and MX100 all suffer from a very serious issue wrt queued trim (possibly related to link power management). It is imho far more serious than the 840 EVO issues as it kills your data, but much fewer people are affected by it (only these using linux and of those most won't ever see it because the kernel was patched to blacklist the feature). This problem which was known for one and a half year or so is now finally acknowledged and fixed in firmware for the M550 and MX100 (still unfixed on the M500 where it was discovered, the MX200 had it fixed from start and the BX100 doesn't support queued trim in the first place apparently and has a different controller anyway).That does not exactly inspire confidence - Crucial claiming "hard to reproduce" or something along these lines, because apparently both Windows and Mac OS only use non-queued variant of trim (well I don't know for sure about Mac OS because this one doesn't use trim at all by default for non-apple built ssds), but it was very easy to produce failures with linux.
If windows were to support queued trim tomorrow you'd see return rates soar to levels never seen before... (or probably not, because if that would be enabled now surely the feature would be blacklisted for these drives too).
Not saying queued trim is an essential feature (it's clearly not), but if Crucial wasn't willing to actually test it with the only OS which supports it they probably shouldn't have enabled it in the first place...
I have to say though this is not really enough to steer me away from Crucial SSDs (they indeed provide very good value overall), but keep that in mind if you think Samsung are the only ones with Firmware issues.
FunBunny2 - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
Since AT went into the OCZ madness, back then, how about some investigation into this new firmware? From following the comments, it's something of a clusterfluff.GregGritton - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link
I hope that Anandtech returns to posting the log-based I/O consistency graphs.What you really want in the graph is an indication of how likely and severe of slowdowns you will experience, which means you want to graph the time per I/O operation (averaged over a short period like a second) rather than the number of I/O operations per second. Then, any outliers have significance. This means all of the useful information in the ops/second graphs are scrunched down at the bottom, where it is hard to see what the actual value is. (For example, the Crucial BX seems to generally have 2000 I/O ops/second, but it is hard to tell as the first line on the 1st graph is 10,000, and 5,000 on the 2nd.)
The logarithmic graphs spread out the lower I/O ops/second values enough so that you could tell farily easily where there lower values were. Thus, they were a good compromise between a ops/second graph and a (milli/micro)seconds/op graph.
jamesnieves - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link
my Aunty Isabella recently got a superb Dodge Challenger SRT8 by working part time off of a macbook air.workripple．com
Laststop311 - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link
Well if you want to put an ssd in your laptop this is the drive to get.soccerharms - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
The 850 EVO just dropped to 179 for the 500GB on amazon with the bx100 at 187. I will be using this in a laptop. What does everyone think?CknSalad - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Samsung 850 Pro 256GB is $130 on Ebay just today! Just ordered mine!JackF - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
I was surprised that the Mushkin Reactor 1T was not in the table comparisons. It was just reviewed by Kristian back in February and received an Anandtech Recommendation. It looks to me to fin right in this performance category and they have been running the 1T versions at $339.After deliberating, I just upgraded to a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB (at $350). It is a noticeable upgrade from my older Crucial M4 256GB.
Walkeer - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
perhaps I am blind, but the Samsung EVO seems either more power efficient or equal compared to BX100 from the idle power consumption graph, is that correct? That invalidates the final words.leexgx - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
The bx100 is the most power efficient ssd at this time (I have the bx100 120gb soon)Only interesting thing here was devsleep used or was this just slumber (dipm+hipm only)