The Crucial BX300 (480GB) SSD Review: Back To MLC
by Billy Tallis on August 29, 2017 9:00 AM ESTRandom Read Performance
Our first test of random read performance uses very short bursts of operations issued one at a time with no queuing. The drives are given enough idle time between bursts to yield an overall duty cycle of 20%, so thermal throttling is impossible. Each burst consists of a total of 32MB of 4kB random reads, from a 16GB span of the disk. The total data read is 1GB.
The burst random read performance of the Crucial BX300 is better than the previous Crucial SSDs, but still trails behind quite a few other MLC SSDs and the two fastest 3D TLC SSDs.
Our sustained random read performance is similar to the random read test from our 2015 test suite: queue depths from 1 to 32 are tested, and the average performance and power efficiency across QD1, QD2 and QD4 are reported as the primary scores. Each queue depth is tested for one minute or 32GB of data transferred, whichever is shorter. After each queue depth is tested, the drive is given up to one minute to cool off so that the higher queue depths are unlikely to be affected by accumulated heat build-up. The individual read operations are again 4kB, and cover a 64GB span of the drive.
On a longer test of random read performance and with some higher queue depths in play, the Crucial BX300 ends up falling behind the MX200 but is substantially faster than the MX300 and most other TLC SSDs. Most of the MLC SSDs and the 3D TLC-based Samsung 850 EVO and Intel 545s significantly outperform the Crucial BX300.
The power efficiency of the Crucial BX300 when performing random reads is a bit below average for SATA SSDs, with a few planar TLC SSDs beating it.
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With a high enough queue depth, the Crucial BX300 delivers random read performance that is as good as any SATA drive of this capacity, but it also requires quite a bit of power to perform that well. At more modest queue depths, the BX300 underperforms most of its competition-especially the Samsung drives, which saturate at QD16.
Random Write Performance
Our test of random write burst performance is structured similarly to the random read burst test, but each burst is only 4MB and the total test length is 128MB. The 4kB random write operations are distributed over a 16GB span of the drive, and the operations are issued one at a time with no queuing.
The Crucial BX300's QD1 burst random write performance is tied with the Samsung 850 EVO for second place, slightly behind the ADATA SP550 of all things. Crucial's MX300 is only about 6% slower, while the Samsung 850 PRO is about 16% slower.
As with the sustained random read test, our sustained 4kB random write test runs for up to one minute or 32GB per queue depth, covering a 64GB span of the drive and giving the drive up to 1 minute of idle time between queue depths to allow for write caches to be flushed and for the drive to cool down.
With a longer test duration and higher queue depths, the Crucial BX300 holds on to second place, this time scoring just behind the Crucial MX200. The Samsung 850s are just a hair slower than the BX300, and the Crucial MX300 is the next fastest.
In terms of power efficiency during the random write test, the BX300 is again in second place, with the MX300 holding on to a safe lead. The BX200's efficiency was abysmal, and the BX300 provides four times the performance per Watt on this test.
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The Crucial BX300 scales to near saturation by QD4, but power consumption keeps increasing up to QD8. The performance curve for the MX300 is just below the BX300's, but the power consumption of the MX300 stays significantly lower and even the slowest drives end up drawing more power than the MX300.
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MrSpadge - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
A budget drive with budget price, without any real weakness - well done!nwarawa - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Does this thing still have partial power loss protection? I don't see much in the way of capacitors in the images, at least compared to the M500 up to the MX300Ryan Smith - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
No, it does not. The BX series always omits that feature.nwarawa - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
"The BX series always omits that feature."Incorrect. The BX100 most definitely did. I even confirmed with Crucial themselves.
Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
BX100 PCB: http://www.storagereview.com/images/StorageReview-...No power loss protection.
BX series has never offered it. If Micron/Crucial said otherwise, they lied.
Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
Here is a high-res shot from AT: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9144/IMG_2266.jpgKristian seems to believe in that review there are enough caps to drive 8 NAND dies, a piece of 1.35v DDR3 DRAM, and the SMI controller, for 200us.
As an engineer, without even measuring the capacitance of the tiny inlays of that PCB, it's visually clear this is physically impossible. Just comparing to the PCB of the MX100 which has a dedicated PLP circuit and rows of caps, no matter how much power efficiency the BX100 design has over the MX100, the level of PLP is going to be entirely different, which leads me to this thread:
This thread has a good definition of "power loss protection" on the BX100: http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/Crucial-...
Basically, it's discussed that about 2-4MB of the indirection table cache (which is write-thru to the NAND by design) can be protected by the design. In other words, insignificant and irrelevant. This is why PLP was never marketed for the BX100. It's useless. Most non-enterprise implementations are.
nwarawa - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
I wouldn't call partial PLP "useless". Old SSDs wouldn't just lose SOME data. They would often lose ALL data. It would be nice to see an updated version of this test from years ago:http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html
The M4 didn't have the partial PLP, so it would be interesting to see how much of an improvement the M500 with it's partial PLP made. For that matter, some Phison S10 drives and Samsung's last few years of models mention some form of firmware based PLP... so how effective are they?
Anyone want to start a GoFundMe for this guy to run some updated tests?
nwarawa - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
Update: I reached out to lkcl to see if he's interested in continuing the testing, and if GoFundMe would work for him. I said I would chip in $10-$20 to see some updated test results. Anyone else interested in these tests?nwarawa - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
Samus, you didn't read carefully enough. It's not whether or not it has FULL power loss protection, but PARTIAL power loss protection. You can read anandtech's review of the BX100 for more information on what that entails. The very link you posted shows the little capacitors that are sufficient for the PARTIAL power loss protection. The reason this was even brought up is that there seem to be fewer of those capacitors on the BX300, which raised doubt as to if the feature was still included. I was just in a convo with Crucial directly, and they confirmed that the BX300 does indeed still have partial PLP.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
when 3D NAND was first proposed, durability was supposed to improve because such devices could/would be built on larger nm nodes. has that actually happened? what node(s) are being used for 32/64L?