Crucial BX100 1TB Solid State Drive Review

Introduction

After having tested the Crucial BX100 500GB SSD a little while ago, it has now become time to take the 1TB model a test drive on my test setup.

“We designed the MX200 and BX100 to meet the varied needs of the market, making it easier for anyone to move to an SSD, whether they are a seasoned computer enthusiast or an absolute beginner, all while keeping value top of mind,” said Jonathan Weech, senior worldwide product manager, Crucial. “These drives leverage Micron’s years of heritage in storage technology to deliver advanced features and performance, resulting in an unparalleled SSD experience for our consumers.”

The BX100 is a budget series of SSD drives, but that doesn’t mean that you have to sacrifice a whole lot of performance. The drive still promises sequential operations up to 535MB/s reading and 450MB/s when writing – on all file types. The random performance is rated for up to 90k IOPS.

The BX100 series is the first of Crucial’s drives to use the Silicon Motion SM2245EN controller, a controller we’ve seen perform great in other drives. Inside the drive, we also find 16 Micron NAND and two Micron RAM cache chips.

The BX100 also has a pretty good feature list with thermal monitoring, data path protection, active garbage collection, TRIM and SMART support as well as Error Correction Code (ECC). The only thing that could be considered missing is the hardware encryption.

It has comes rated with a life expectancy of 1.5 million hours MTBF and an endurance rating of up to 72TB total bytes written (TBW). That would equal 40GB of data being written every day for a five year period – two years longer than the three-year warranty, so the stability and safety on this drive should be guaranteed.

The Crucial BX100 SSD isn’t the fastest drive on the market, but it’s not designed to be. By treating all data the same, the Crucial BX100 allows you to do everything quickly whether you’re saving an image, accessing a ZIP file, or loading a video – on a budget.

With a 1TB capacity like we’re getting from this drive, we decrease the consideration to replace the old mechanical drives significantly. An SSD such as the BX100 will perform over fifteen times faster than a typical hard drive, be two times more reliable, be over twice as energy-efficient, and generally be more durable due to better shock resistance and lower heat creation. If the price matches the performance, it could be a winner.