Crucial MX100 256GB Solid State Drive Review

Introduction

Coming off the back of our look at the 512GB model of Crucial’s new MX100 line of drives, our review today focusses on the mid-range 256GB drive which comes in at a level that many users tend to adopt due to the balance between performance and capacity. As we saw with the 512GB though, Crucial have re-written the pricing rule book with a drive that is priced lower per GB than any other drive on the market and overall costing around the same as a 256GB drive from many other brands.

Keeping with the trend of bargain bucket pricing, the 256GB MX100 comes in with a banker approved price of $109.99 in the states and £78.99 over here in the UK, making it once again the ideal solution for the upgrade market; where users want to get a good boost in their systems performance, but without a hefty price that is associated with many performance products.

Similar to the 512GB drive, the 256GB model utilises Micron’s latest 16nm NAND design with a Marvell 88SS9189 controller at the heart of the drive and performance wise we see the same 550MB/s read speeds, whilst the write speed is a little lower at a more modest 330MB/s. The IOPs performance is also down a little from the top line 512GB drive at 85k read and 70k write, however we do still get the same 72TB lifespan and the same three-year warranty as before.

We know the read speeds that the MX100 has to offer are very competitive throughout the market, so our focus in this review will be aimed more at the write performance. This drive may be cheap, but the last thing we want is a drive that is cheap and cheerful.