The Crucial BX300 (480GB) SSD Review: Back To MLC
by Billy Tallis on August 29, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Crucial SSDs occupy the bottom half of the average data rate rankings for the Light test, as the other 3D NAND SSDs in this bunch are able to deliver higher peak performance. The BX300 is slower than the MX300 when the test is run on an empty drive, but for a full drive the BX300 is the fastest Crucial SSD and also faster than the ADATA SU800.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores for the BX300 are worse than the other 3D NAND SSDs in this comparison, but there's enough of a gap for it to matter.
The average read latency of the Crucial BX300 on the Light test is better than any other Crucial drive, but is unimpressive compared to the 3D NAND SSDs from other brands. The average write latency is significantly higher than most of the other SSDs (excepting the BX200), but is not enough to cause real problems for light workloads.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies tell pretty much the same story as the averages for the BX300: it performs fine for read operations, but is a bit slower for writes.
The Crucial BX300 turns in another second-place score for power efficiency, behind the MX300. The Light test doesn't put too much stress on the MX300's SLC caching, so it keeps its first-place efficiency even when the test is run on a full drive.
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lilmoe - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Question. This is provably unlikely, but is binning layers possible?lilmoe - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Probably*Billy Tallis - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
3D NAND is not really built one layer at a time. The first stage of building the memory array is to make a tall stack of alternating materials, and then vertical strings of memory cells are formed through that stack by etching deep but narrow holes and filling them with the remaining components. That high aspect ratio etching step is one of the main limiting factors in scaling layer count. If you push the layer count too far, you end up with memory cells in layers near the top of the stack having significantly different properties from the ones near the bottom of the stack.It's relatively unlikely to have an individual layer somewhere in the middle of the stack be dead/defective across that entire layer. It's more common to see an entire vertical column fail, which involves a much smaller number of memory cells.
Radio-Zone - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Thanks for the information!!!Ej24 - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Congratulations Micron you're almost back to where you were 2 years ago in performance with the m550, Mx100 and mx200. I've always been a huge fan of crucial SSD's. Great bang for the buck for MLC drives. But the last year or so it's been hard to keep praising crucial.m16 - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
It's an interesting move, but all in all, due to the shortage, any SATA drive will do for anyone that is looking for a switch to SSD on the desktop, while power might be the top issue for laptops.There's the RAM caching on some of their drives which is very good all in all, especially for computers that have AMD CPUs, that can't use Intel's caching technology to speed things up.
keta - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
Over two-and-a-half years ago (January 2015), I bought a 256GB MX100 for $95. That worked out to $0.371/GB, or a little less than what the BX300 is going for today ($0.375).I would be willing to pay the same rate if it meant better performance, but using the ATSB Heavy stats in Bench, it seems that my old MX100 outperforms the BX300 in both data rate and latency. Are the 2015 ATSB Heavy stats comparable to the 2017 stats? Is it really the case that SATA SSD price/performance is worse than it was 2.5 years ago?
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
The average data rate and latency stats for the ATSB tests should be comparable between the 2015 and 2017 test suites. The workload didn't change, but the OS version and motherboard did. Next month or maybe late this month, I'll pull the MX100 from my gaming machine and put it through the 2017 test suite.keta - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
Thanks! I'd be super interested in a 'long-view' piece that puts some of the older flagship SSDs (X-25M, Vertex 2, MX100) through the present-day latency/consistency analysis that AT has developed. And maybe throw in that old WD Scorpio as well, not just to see how far we've come from spinning drives, but also to put the differences between SSDs in perspective!Lolimaster - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link
And now in Peru you can find the BX300 120GB for $35 xD.