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Final Thoughts
For years, all we ever cared about from our solid-state drives was their performance. Many companies attempted to deliver lower-cost products, some with six or seven overlapping drives selling at the same time. That strategy proved difficult to maintain, causing end-users a lot of pain. After all, the most expensive component in a SSD is its flash. Using lower-quality flash helps bring down cost. But if it also translates to higher failure rates, that's how reputations become tarnished.
Today's low-cost products are a bit different. Some companies continue using lower-quality flash and gambling with their reputation (and your data). That's just not an option for Crucial, though. As a subsidiary of Lexar, parent company of Micron, Crucial has access to the highest-quality flash before competing drive vendors can buy it up.
Silicon Motion's SM2246EN controller allows Crucial to save a little money compared to the Marvell processors found elsewhere in the company's SSD portfolio. The cheaper controller is missing advanced features like DevSlp support and hardware-based encryption. But at the same time, the BX100 family's overall cost is lower, too. The SM2246EN handles sequential data well and struggles with random operations. As such, you'd have a difficult time finding a secondary drive in this price range to transfer and hold large media files that is better than the BX100.
We could certainly recommend faster options for primary drives, but they're going to be more expensive. In this price range, Muskin's Reactor 1TB costs a little less, though it lacks the premium Micron flash and Storage Executive software. That drive recently made our Best SSDs for the Money list due to its great value, so don't be surprised if Crucial's BX100 displaces it in the future.
Enthusiasts who install software when they build new PCs, but then mainly read data from their SSD should find the 1TB BX100 1TB to be ample. It mitigates the latency of a mechanical drive in both sequential and random transfers. When it has enough idle time to keep its pages clean, the SSD performs nearly as well as some of the top models out there. Of course, heavy I/O causes the BX100's performance to drop quite a bit. You'll still enjoy an experience that beats conventional hard disks, though perhaps at that point it'd be wise to consider something with an emulated SLC cache layer and better wear-leveling algorithms.
