Crucial BX200 SSD Review

Micron announced its 16nm TLC flash five months ago, and Crucial's BX200 is the first product to take advantage of the extra bit per cell. Is this late-comer competitive, or is it overwhelmed in a sea of superior solid-state storage?

By Chris Ramseyer
published

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A Closer Look

The BX200 ships in a retail package with fast facts about what's inside, the warranty and a summarized feature set. All of Crucial's retail SSDs ship in similar packaging.

You also get the expected 7mm-to-9.5mm bracket and a paper with the code for Acronis, as well as the download link.

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Physically, the drive is almost identical to the BX100, with the same enclosure and dimensions. Its 7mm design fits in Ultrabooks requiring the slimmer chassis. Unfortunately, the case material is not as robust as what Crucial uses to build the MX200 SSDs.

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The BX200 960GB uses sixteen NAND flash packages. This maximizes the CE to the 4-channel SM2256 controller. 

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The controller from Silicon Motion is labeled SM2256G. The letter on the end is different than the other drives we've tested. We have a few SM2256-based SSDs in the review queue, and those all ship with the SM2256X. We asked SMI what the X indicates and were told it’s the general SM2256 controller. We have yet to hear back what the G designation specifies.

The 960GB model has two DRAM packages for buffering page table data. The other two capacities use a single package. This is our first look at Micron’s 16nm TLC memory. The 960GB BX200 uses Micron’s highest-capacity package, 512Gb or 64GB. According to a Micron document, these are in production, while the lower-capacity modules are sampling and not in production. Performance for the package is rated at 333 MT/s.

Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews consumer storage.
16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • SylentVyper
    These drives better come in a decent amount under the suggested price. The 850 Evo is constantly hitting those price points (or less) and prices have only been dropping. The 850 Evo is slightly faster on the sequential side, but far better with random read/write IOPS. You also get a better warranty, too.
    Reply
  • mapesdhs
    Atm I don't see any reason to buy anything other than the 850 EVO atm in that budget range, they are priced so well. Bought a 250GB this week for my brother, it was only 63 UKP total from Amazon. Bought two 500GB units for myself for 117 each. Other vendors will have to move a lot in order to compete even on price, never mind performance & warranty.
    Reply
  • AndrewJacksonZA
    Did you duplicate the latency histogram pie charts for the BX200 960GB and the BX100 500GB? They're exactly the same.

    Thanks
    Reply
  • flyflinger
    Wow, what a dog.... woof woof.
    Reply
  • daglesj
    I love it when a manufacturer replaces a older model with a model that performs far worse. Time to snap up those excellent BX100's on clearance sales! How do companies screw up like this? Doesn't anyone do product testing and benchmarking before release anymore?
    Reply
  • nforce4max
    I for once I almost no interest in current generation SSDs as I do not like TLC nand and not impressed with the performance in general. Just something to avoid when buying SSDs especially when it comes to the cheaper low capacity models for my projects. Last thing that I need is having to re-write everything every few months or suffer spinner level or worse performance (problem with planar TLC nand).

    For those who have been out of the loop or haven't bough their first SSD yet just avoid SSDs that use TLC unless it is 3D (stacked) and just pay a little more for MLC.
    Reply
  • Chris Droste
    Kinda Ridiculous when you can get the MX100 512GB w/ MLC NAND for $149. unless they're planning on making the 480gig a sub-$100 drive by the holidays this is a non-starter.
    Reply
  • CRamseyer
    Did you duplicate the latency histogram pie charts for the BX200 960GB and the BX100 500GB? They're exactly the same.

    Thanks

    It's not a duplicate. The latency distribution is just the same for both. I'm working on fine tuning those charts a bit.

    Also, you will notice that the bars on the side are different sizes even though it's still 0%. Data has fallen into those buckets but not more than 1%.
    Reply
  • AndrewJacksonZA
    Thanks Chris.
    Reply
  • George Phillips
    Crucial's products are usually good, pretty fast, and very reliable. This one is an exception.
    Reply