Final Thoughts
Pricing
The brand new Crucial MX300 can you be yours for $199.99 through NewEgg, which is also the MSRP, or for £175.68 through Amazon UK.
Conclusion
Let us start out with the basics that are quick and simple, the looks and form factor. The Crucial MX300 750GB drive that I tested today is a default 2.5-inch SATA drive that comes with the same Crucial design that we’ve seen on the previous drives. It’s simple with its two-piece silver enclosure and stickers on each side. The SATA3 interface is still the go-to connector for most people and as such the drive will have a potentially large market to conquer.
Analyzing the performance aspect of Crucial’s MX300 is a little more difficult. The MX300 doesn’t fully behave like the drives that we are used to. I started the review by saying that the MX300 was a combination of the MX and BX range of Crucial’s drives and that sums it up pretty good. The drive is built with TLC NAND that does have its disadvantages towards MLC, just as MLC has towards SLC, but there are other areas where the drive shines.
In the synthetic benchmarks such as ATTO, AS SSD, and CDM, the MX300 didn’t show as great figures as other drives we’ve tested. This however changes when we look at tests such as PCMark 8’s Storage Benchmark and AIDA64’s Storage benchmark. A common flaw with TLC drives is that they can’t keep up a consistent write speed when the cache has been filled, but this is a place where the MX300 shines. It kept up the same write performance throughout the entire drive in AIDA’s linear tests and got great scores in PCMark’s real-world benchmarks. Overall, the MX300 scored in a straight line throughout most tests too with just a single minor drop. This is always a great sign when the drive keeps its performance straight rather than short peaks here and there to gain a higher max score on paper.
So, while the MX300 might not be able to get top scores on the basic tests, the drive is a great choice as hard disk replacement. You get fast read speeds that speed up anything your system does as well as improved write performance and it is without a doubt the best writing TLC drive that I’ve tested to date. It represents the next step of TLC-based drives and I understand why Crucial and Micron were excited to get a drive with this NAND on the market and show what it can do, and I’m also sure that we’ll see more improvements on this down the road.
Pros
- Best TLC-based write scores to date
- Large capacity
- Low price
- Great feature set
- Included cloning software and 9.5mm spacer
Cons
- Falls a bit behind in synthetic benchmarks
“A great performance and endurance, as well as a large capacity for very little money, make the Crucial MX300 a great HDD replacement.”
Thank you Crucial for providing us with this sample.
