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?
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Conclusion
We didn't tackle this conclusion until all of our tests with Momentum Cache finished. It turns out that the DRAM cache doesn’t improve real-world performance enough for the BX200 to catch its low-cost SSD competition. Even with the cache enabled, performance only goes up to match some of the slowest drives available. Because of that, this goes down as one of the most disappointing SSDs introduced since 2008, when early JMicron DRAM-less controllers suffered the stutter fiasco. I really just can’t understand how Crucial tested this drive in-house and decided to release the BX200 in its current form.
We used our new low-cost SSD charts today, so we didn’t even compare the BX200 to the best-performing SATA drives available. Many of those only cost $20 to $30 more at the 512GB capacity point. Even though Crucial told us that its MSRP probably won't hold for long, it’s the only pricing we have. At its suggested retail price, the BX200 is not competitive with any SSD sold today. Adata's SP550 costs less, uses the same controller and has faster SK Hynix 16nm TLC flash.
For the BX200 to compete, its price has to fall below the SP550. I wouldn't buy the Crucial drive if its price was within 15 percent of the Adata.
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
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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
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AndrewJacksonZA Did you duplicate the latency histogram pie charts for the BX200 960GB and the BX100 500GB? They're exactly the same.Reply
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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).Reply
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. -
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%.
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George Phillips Crucial's products are usually good, pretty fast, and very reliable. This one is an exception.Reply