The Crucial BX300 (480GB) SSD Review: Back To MLC
by Billy Tallis on August 29, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Crucial BX300 is tied for second-fastest average data rate on The Destroyer among SATA drives. The BX300's performance falls between the Samsung 850 EVO and 850 PRO, and matches the Intel 545s that uses a newer generation of 3D NAND and a newer SSD controller.
The BX300's latency during The Destroyer is best in class, with both average and 99th percentile latencies at the top of the chart.
Breaking the average latency score down by read and write operations, we find the BX300 in second place for each subscore, but with a different drive in first place each time: the 850 PRO is what beats the BX300's average read latency, and the Crucial MX200 beats the BX300's average write latency.
The Crucial BX300 does a great job keeping read latency low throughout the destroyer, with the lowest 99th percentile read latency out of this bunch of drives. By contrast, the 99th percentile write latency only ranks third, behind the Intel 545s and Samsung 850 PRO. The MX300's 99th percentile write latency is moderately worse than the BX300's, but its 99th percentile read latency is almost twice as high.
The BX300 further improves on the power efficiency of the MX300, but not enough to match the Intel 545s that benefits both from a newer Silicon Motion controller and from newer 64L 3D NAND.
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khon - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I don't get the point of this product. If you care enough of performance to get MLC NAND rather than TLC NAND, why would you get a SATA SSD ?bill.rookard - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Sometimes it's just form factor. You may have a laptop that only has regular SATA SSD's or are upgrading to a SSD from a spinny-disk (which are decidedly awful in laptops). Or - perhaps you have a NAS or server which uses 2.5" SATA drives, or a desktop that doesn't have an M.2 slot.There are lots of reasons to have a SATA option.
nathanddrews - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
True. I have a couple pre-NVME computers that need an upgrade, so that's why I go SATA.eek2121 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
1) Buy M.2 adapter card.2) Use clover to boot from NVME
3) ???
4) PROFIT!!!
Alexvrb - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
The cheapest and easiest way to upgrade a conventional SATA-equipped system to an SSD is with a SATA SSD. Also M.2 is a form factor, not an interface. A lot of the entry-level / affordable M.2 drives are SATA-based. The added costs and complexities to get something substantially faster than SATA might not be worth it. Meanwhile a sub-$100 Evo drive can help revive an older system for cheap, it's the same price as competing products and it's somewhat better.Also, if you're talking about using Clover/Tianocore with a legacy non-UEFI bios, it's kind of a mild nuisance. Especially if you're doing it for someone else on a budget. Plus you still need to use the existing mechanical clunker SATA drive (well you could add a USB stick I guess) for the BIOS to boot and load Tianocore.
Last but not least if you're talking about an older laptop, you might very well be stuck with SATA or mSATA. So might as well make the most of it. There are a lot of OEM systems with decent enough processors, saddled with horribly slow HDDs. Easy and cheap way to rev them up.
leexgx - Saturday, September 2, 2017 - link
he thinks the laptop is a PC :PMajGenRelativity - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
People also have concerns about life expectancy of their hard drives. As far as performance, SATA is still cheaper than PCIe, so cost plays a factor as well.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Although I'll probably NEVER hit an endrance wall with TLC NAND, since the prices for TLC and MLC in are disturbingly close at this point, I see no reason not to purchase MLC. In fact, I just bought two 240GB and one 480GB SATA SSD two weeks ago and all of them were 3D MLC because there was no difference in price. I think it might be more reasonable to ask why anyone would bother with TLC in SATA or any other form factor given the current state of the market.littlebitstrouds - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Really it's quite easy... If MLC is better for endurance, and we can't find SLC anymore, without going full enterprise, anyone who engineers systems for stability will inevitably take a MLC nand storage device over a TLC, all other parts being equal. Just because you can't see a reason, doesn't mean there isn't a market for it. I guarantee you don't understand every aspect of every engineering problem that exists, which means you may not understand why a company, with shareholders, would devise such a product.sonny73n - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Seriously, you said it's easy to see the reason why but you kept ranting on without giving us a reason why they keep producing TLC and selling them at the same price with MLC.