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
AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
While The Destroyer focuses on sustained and worst-case performance by hammering the drive with nearly 1TB worth of writes, the Heavy trace provides a more typical enthusiast and power user workload. By writing less to the drive, the Heavy trace doesn't drive the SSD into steady-state and thus the trace gives us a good idea of peak performance combined with some basic garbage collection routines. For full details of the test, please refer to the this article.
The BX100 continues to be a strong performer in our Heavy trace. It's not able to match the Samsung drives, but overall it provides very good performance for a value drive.
The number of high latency IOs isn't alarming either and the 120GB BX100 actually performs better than the 120GB 850 EVO, especially when the drive is full.
The power consumption is again excellent. While we have known that the SM2246EN is very power efficient, these tests further assure its efficiency and advantage over competing solutions.
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Hulk - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
Wow, that validates all of the other reviews I've been reading about this drive. Great performance, great value, and no TLC NAND worries. I'm getting one for my new laptop.Uplink10 - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link
If you want a great value you better wait for a few months (maybe more than a few) till 3D NAND drives are going to come out from SanDisk, Micron, Intel, Toshiba. Then Samsing will not be the only company with 3D NAND drives and prices will probably going to come down.Harry_Wild - Saturday, April 25, 2015 - link
Thanks for the info! I will wait it out to get the best 3D NAND drives.Hace - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
I'm kinda surprised you didn't draw more attention to the 850 EVO as a competitor, which is neck-in-neck with pricing.digiguy - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
Yes, similar value for the money, and definitely more than the 840 EVO....Kristian Vättö - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
I have to admit that I totally overlooked the 850 EVO as I was kinda assuming that its price would be higher. I put this review together on a very short notice as Ryan couldn't get the MacBook review finished for today, hence my mistake of not paying enough attention to the prices (even though I updated the table today...). Anyway, I've updated the conclusion to take the 850 EVO into account because as you said, the pricing is very close and it does provide a little higher performance.Hulk - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
While the 850EVO is definitely a competitor for the BX100 the fact that it uses TLC NAND vs. MLC for the BX100 is a big deal for many people who aren't as yet convinced the 850EVO won't be affected by the read issue that is still a problem with the 840EVO. I realize the cell size for the 850 EVO's 3D NAND is much greater but as I wrote above many people, myself included, don't see the need to roll the dice on the 850EVO when the BX100 will provide basically similar performance.just4U - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
The 850Evo is $20-$50 more on all models here in Canada. Not sure what stateside or Euro Pricing is like.Margalus - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link
I just bought a 1TB EVO for $350 on Amazon, USArepoman27 - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link
Kristian, hopefully you'll be helping Ryan with that MacBook review by covering the NVMe(!) SSD it ships with in depth. Looks to be a PCIe 2.0 x4 connected device dubbed "AP0256H", so possibly a semi-custom Apple controller based on the Marvell 88SS1093.