Crucial BX200 960GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Crucial BX200 has a price that hasn’t been seen before and especially not with this capacity. A viable option over mechanical hard drives with 960GB capacity. The Crucial BX200 comes with an MSRP of £234.49 ($299.99) for the 960GB model and £66.49 ($84.99) and £116.99 ($149.99) for the smaller 240GB and 480GB models.

Conclusion

It was more than a pleasure to have Crucial’s new BX200 solid state drive on the test bench these last couple of days and it performed admirably. Granted, it isn’t topping out any charts except one, and that is the price one. We have never before been able to get this much solid state capacity for our money. The performance was still great as we saw in our benchmarks with 68K IOPS random read and 84K IOPS write performance. The sequential performance wasn’t bad either and we saw results up to 550M/s read and 480MB/s write.

This is the first drive that uses Micron’s 16nm TLC NAND, which makes it even more interesting. TLC NAND allows for drives with larger capacities and lower power consumption on top of the low price per GB storage, but it does come with the cost of less durability. That is at least on paper. We didn’t see any impact at all in the benchmarks when comparing the fresh drive with the results after the conditioning. The total bytes written rating o 72TB might sound like little in our days, but it is more than plenty and it equals 40GB per day for 5 years – and few write that in a whole week.

The physical design is very simple and it looks like Crucial SSDs look, there isn’t much to say here. Inside it’s built with a Silicon Motion SM2256 controller with custom Micron firmware and the aforementioned 16nm Micron TLC NAND. Feature wise we find everything we want, starting with SMART, Thermal monitoring, Active Garbage Collection, and TRIM, as well as SLC Write Acceleration, Error Correction Code, and DevSleep that is particularly useful for notebook users. Overall, it has it all and it comes at an unbeatable price for solid state drives. The perfect HDD replacement.

Crucial’s software is also better than ever and a new version was released together with the drive. Along with the already present features such as SMART monitoring, firmware upgrade, and momentum cache, it now also features user customizable over provisioning.

Pros

• Good performance
• Very cheap
• Micron controller and NAND
• 9.5mm adapter included
• Acronis True HD code included

Cons

• Speed drops during long sequential operations (AIDA64)

Neutral

• TLC NAND has lower endurance than MLC but brings more capacity per real estate.

“With Crucial’s BX200 SSD series there aren’t any excuse left to stay with traditional mechanical storage. Make the switch and enjoy all the benefits of SSDs”

Thank you Crucial for providing us with this sample.