I wonder how the mx200s would fare as write cache drives in storage spaces or as a ZIL drive in zfs. seems like a very cost effective alternative to a true slc drive as long as you limit the partition to half of total storage it would be true SLC durability, correct?
Excellent idea, abhaxus. You get basically an all-SLC drive if you keep the storage at less than 50% capacity. You probably don't even have to do anything out of the ordinary to limit the size. ZFS's SLOG/ZIL will almost never hit that size. (Remember it's only used for data in transit, and data is committed to disk periodically.)
Also, note that the mx100, m550, m500 all have power-supply data protection, so that data is guaranteed to be committed to the SSD (even for MLC) as long as it has made it to the controller. This makes crucial SSD's (regardless of model) my choice for ZFS ZIL/SLOG.
booooo. i just bought 2 crucial m500's and i just printed the RMA's. going back to samsung. willing to pay a higher price for a ssd that doesn't freeze, hang up or not wake up from standby. plus, samsung magician is a lot more mature and convenient.
I am surprise. My m550 in Elitebook 8470p is fast like lightning and never freeze. My M4 in my wife x200 that I maintain, never freeze. Believe me... She would be the first one bitching around. However, the Samsung in my old X60 tablet is running rock solid too.
Never had any issues with the M500. My "portable/guest" desktop and my HTPC both use 240GB M500s, and have never had one hiccup. I tried an Intel 530 on my portable machine, and had random freezing for around 30-60 seconds at a time. Must have gotten lemons?
My desktop has a Samsung 840 pro, and my wife has the 840 evo, no issues with either one of those either.
The only issues I've ever had with Crucial drives were caused by firmware issues. My C300 was stuttery before a firmware update, and then an M4 had a freeze after one hour issue after being on for 5184 hours or something like that. Firmware update fixed that one as well.
My rule of thumb is avoid any drive with a Sandforce controller, as those seem to have the freezing issues.
It's amazing how technical challenges are constantly being worked through by clever minds. A few years ago many people though SSD's were quickly approaching a dead end because decreasing cell sizes were leading to lower and lower endurance.
Now we have MLC cache on TLC drives, dynamic SLC cache, 3d cell technology and other innovations which have not only decreased prices but increase performance and endurance.
So I'm confused, which line is replacing the MX100 line; MX200 or BX100? If the M550 line is Crucial's top-tier line, and the BX100 is their entry-level, would that make the MX200 their mid-tier, or just a second entry-level line that's slightly above the BX100? Where does the M500 line fit into all this?
My confusion is with the strange price / performance overlaps between all the models. It makes it hard to tell what's REALLY replacing what. Newer models do not always perform better and the prices are also not always indicative of this fact.
"Successor" does not necessarily mean "market replacement". The M550 line was the successor to the M500 line but Crucial continued to market both lines at the same time with no mention of discontinuing the M500 line.
It appears (e.g. based on pricing) that the BX100 will be the replacement for the MX100 and the MX200 will replace the M550. Interesting enough, during CES, Newegg was selling the 256GB M550 for $89.99!
I needed another SSD for a new laptop. While the 256GB MX100s I installed in 2 older laptops have performed flawlessly, just purchased a 250GB Samsung 850 EVO.
Was really conflicted in not buying another MX100, but the better performance specification and 5 year warranty won out.
With this announcement, glad I did. I was also able to snag a 250GB 850 EVO for $ .35 / GB.
PS Also installed the Crucial Storage Executive. It's not a stand alone application, instead. runs via a web browser (e.g. choice of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome). It's pretty basic in regard to information / tweaking, but promises, if ever needed, to wipe the drive clean and easily install firmware updates.
I don't get the BX100 pricing. $200 for 500GB WTF? You can get the mx100 for 9.00 more and once the MX200's are out that price will be even less. budget? Hardly.
These things tend to tumble down in price, and MX100 is no longer new.
BX100 replaces MX100 at its approximate price-point. MX200 is the higher-spec successor. It would appear they are going from two price tiers to three to cover moar market.
Seems like nice. It should be 30% faster than XP941, from your pasted URL:
it can read and write sequentially at 1,600MB/s (megabytes per second) and 1,350MB/s respectively based on PCIe 2.0. This performance level is approximately three times faster than that of the latest SSD with a SATA interface and about 30 percent faster than that of the Samsung XP941, its predecessor. In addition, the new SSD’s random read and write speeds reach up to 130,000 and 85,000 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second) respectively.
I wonder how are they pulling ~90k IOPS outta 2246EN. Most drives i've seen using this controller usually top at ~70k IOPS. Either they are using special sauce firmware or they overclocked controller a bit
The V4 used a Phison controller and back then Phison wasn't exactly known for performance. The SM2246EN is a very solid controller, so I'm confident that the BX100 will be a decent drive for the price.
True. But others seem to have been able to make a reasonable drive out of the Phison controller. MyDigitalSSD and Corsair both make Phison based SSD that on paper at least, blow the V4 out of the water.
Yeah, but they used newer versions of phison s series controller. Crucial used phison s5, which was utter garbage even at the time. And it was no different with other OEMs that used that controller either; torq2 and mydigitalssd had the same issues with stuttering and very poor performance.
SSD Toolbox? Finally. The amount of hassle I had to go through to update the SSD on an M400 when the bios was set to UEFI secure boot only. Their bios updater tosses a real-mode boot sector into BCD as a 'one time boot option' - which fails horribly in UEFI boot mode. Luckily, Windows 7 BCD was smart enough to failback to booting windows, instead of leaving the computer unbootable. I ended up extracting their mess to a USB key and setting up the boot options myself, since the 'bootable disk' download was hardcoded to look on the CD for the floppy image, and we didn't have a blank CD/DVD in the house (I considered it lucky I had even put a CD/DVD drive in that PC, but it wasn't useful without the disks).
Neither of these looks like a good replacement for the mx100. The bx loses too many features and to consumers is on an "unproven" controller so it would have to be considerably cheaper, and the 200 is too much of a jump in price for what doesn't look like much more than we're already getting.
The mx100 has been too good to be true for a long while I suppose, maxing out sata performance at budget prices with features like TGC Opal support, matched with the cheapest pricing around.
Maybe crucial got sick off making the rest of their lineup redundant!
They should still have announced a proper pcie drive though. No point upgrading on SATA 3 connections.
Finally they got the connector and sticker on the correct side....jeezes I love crucial and owns 3 of their SSDs, m500 and mx100s, but I could never understood why in the world they decided to flip the front and back of the casing.
Update: just saw a comprehensive review on a Dutch site. It's almost confirmed, the 500GB MX200 does NOT use DWA. The MX200 therefore becomes a boring SSD, not really different from the (now) much cheaper MX100. http://nl.hardware.info/reviews/5902/crucial-bx100... (use google translate)
This is a really strange move for Crucial. They advertise DWA as being the most advanced addition to their new enthusiast SSD line, then they disable it on the most useful versions of the drives? I think I'll go with Samsung's new EVO this year.
Hello! When is the review coming out? I've been checking the site daily for the past 2 months hoping to read your amazing review! I'm mainly interested on how the BX100 compares the MX100 since both on Amazon and on the crucial store their prices are almost identical and they could both be a nice upgrade to my trusty 2009 MacBook Pro. Thanks!
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32 Comments
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abhaxus - Thursday, January 8, 2015 - link
I wonder how the mx200s would fare as write cache drives in storage spaces or as a ZIL drive in zfs. seems like a very cost effective alternative to a true slc drive as long as you limit the partition to half of total storage it would be true SLC durability, correct?Zuirch - Tuesday, January 20, 2015 - link
Excellent idea, abhaxus. You get basically an all-SLC drive if you keep the storage at less than 50% capacity. You probably don't even have to do anything out of the ordinary to limit the size. ZFS's SLOG/ZIL will almost never hit that size. (Remember it's only used for data in transit, and data is committed to disk periodically.)Also, note that the mx100, m550, m500 all have power-supply data protection, so that data is guaranteed to be committed to the SSD (even for MLC) as long as it has made it to the controller. This makes crucial SSD's (regardless of model) my choice for ZFS ZIL/SLOG.
Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
They'd make great L2ARC devices, but I don't forsee them replacing Intel's DC series anytime soon as the "budget SLOG" option.pukemon1976 - Thursday, January 8, 2015 - link
booooo. i just bought 2 crucial m500's and i just printed the RMA's. going back to samsung. willing to pay a higher price for a ssd that doesn't freeze, hang up or not wake up from standby. plus, samsung magician is a lot more mature and convenient.Frangelina - Sunday, January 11, 2015 - link
I am surprise. My m550 in Elitebook 8470p is fast like lightning and never freeze. My M4 in my wife x200 that I maintain, never freeze. Believe me... She would be the first one bitching around. However, the Samsung in my old X60 tablet is running rock solid too.Carskick - Monday, February 16, 2015 - link
Never had any issues with the M500. My "portable/guest" desktop and my HTPC both use 240GB M500s, and have never had one hiccup. I tried an Intel 530 on my portable machine, and had random freezing for around 30-60 seconds at a time. Must have gotten lemons?My desktop has a Samsung 840 pro, and my wife has the 840 evo, no issues with either one of those either.
The only issues I've ever had with Crucial drives were caused by firmware issues. My C300 was stuttery before a firmware update, and then an M4 had a freeze after one hour issue after being on for 5184 hours or something like that. Firmware update fixed that one as well.
My rule of thumb is avoid any drive with a Sandforce controller, as those seem to have the freezing issues.
Hulk - Thursday, January 8, 2015 - link
It's amazing how technical challenges are constantly being worked through by clever minds. A few years ago many people though SSD's were quickly approaching a dead end because decreasing cell sizes were leading to lower and lower endurance.Now we have MLC cache on TLC drives, dynamic SLC cache, 3d cell technology and other innovations which have not only decreased prices but increase performance and endurance.
merikafyeah - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
So I'm confused, which line is replacing the MX100 line; MX200 or BX100? If the M550 line is Crucial's top-tier line, and the BX100 is their entry-level, would that make the MX200 their mid-tier, or just a second entry-level line that's slightly above the BX100? Where does the M500 line fit into all this?mobutu - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
Just read the article:"Crucial just introduced the MX200, the successor of MX100"
merikafyeah - Tuesday, January 13, 2015 - link
My confusion is with the strange price / performance overlaps between all the models. It makes it hard to tell what's REALLY replacing what. Newer models do not always perform better and the prices are also not always indicative of this fact."Successor" does not necessarily mean "market replacement". The M550 line was the successor to the M500 line but Crucial continued to market both lines at the same time with no mention of discontinuing the M500 line.
harrynsally - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
It appears (e.g. based on pricing) that the BX100 will be the replacement for the MX100 and the MX200 will replace the M550. Interesting enough, during CES, Newegg was selling the 256GB M550 for $89.99!I needed another SSD for a new laptop. While the 256GB MX100s I installed in 2 older laptops have performed flawlessly, just purchased a 250GB Samsung 850 EVO.
Was really conflicted in not buying another MX100, but the better performance specification and 5 year warranty won out.
With this announcement, glad I did. I was also able to snag a 250GB 850 EVO for $ .35 / GB.
PS Also installed the Crucial Storage Executive. It's not a stand alone application, instead. runs via a web browser (e.g. choice of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome). It's pretty basic in regard to information / tweaking, but promises, if ever needed, to wipe the drive clean and easily install firmware updates.
piiman - Saturday, January 10, 2015 - link
I don't get the BX100 pricing.$200 for 500GB WTF? You can get the mx100 for 9.00 more and once the MX200's are out that price will be even less. budget? Hardly.
Siana - Monday, February 2, 2015 - link
These things tend to tumble down in price, and MX100 is no longer new.BX100 replaces MX100 at its approximate price-point. MX200 is the higher-spec successor. It would appear they are going from two price tiers to three to cover moar market.
mobutu - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
Hello Kristian, can you test the new NVMe PCIe SM951 Samsung SDD?http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201501060066...
juhatus - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
Seems like nice. It should be 30% faster than XP941, from your pasted URL:it can read and write sequentially at 1,600MB/s (megabytes per second) and 1,350MB/s respectively based on PCIe 2.0. This performance level is approximately three times faster than that of the latest SSD with a SATA interface and about 30 percent faster than that of the Samsung XP941, its predecessor. In addition, the new SSD’s random read and write speeds reach up to 130,000 and 85,000 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second) respectively.
Kristian Vättö - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
As soon as I get the drive, yes.tisho75 - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
Just downloaded Crucial Storage Executive - it can't recognize MX100 in storage spaces :(hojnikb - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
I wonder how are they pulling ~90k IOPS outta 2246EN. Most drives i've seen using this controller usually top at ~70k IOPS. Either they are using special sauce firmware or they overclocked controller a bitTheWrongChristian - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
I hope the bx100 isn't another V4. All the reviews of that showed it was a dog and a very poor value proposition.Kristian Vättö - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
The V4 used a Phison controller and back then Phison wasn't exactly known for performance. The SM2246EN is a very solid controller, so I'm confident that the BX100 will be a decent drive for the price.TheWrongChristian - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link
True. But others seem to have been able to make a reasonable drive out of the Phison controller. MyDigitalSSD and Corsair both make Phison based SSD that on paper at least, blow the V4 out of the water.hojnikb - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link
Yeah, but they used newer versions of phison s series controller. Crucial used phison s5, which was utter garbage even at the time. And it was no different with other OEMs that used that controller either; torq2 and mydigitalssd had the same issues with stuttering and very poor performance.Araemo - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
SSD Toolbox? Finally. The amount of hassle I had to go through to update the SSD on an M400 when the bios was set to UEFI secure boot only. Their bios updater tosses a real-mode boot sector into BCD as a 'one time boot option' - which fails horribly in UEFI boot mode. Luckily, Windows 7 BCD was smart enough to failback to booting windows, instead of leaving the computer unbootable. I ended up extracting their mess to a USB key and setting up the boot options myself, since the 'bootable disk' download was hardcoded to look on the CD for the floppy image, and we didn't have a blank CD/DVD in the house (I considered it lucky I had even put a CD/DVD drive in that PC, but it wasn't useful without the disks).shadarlo - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
As long as prices drop as much under MSRP as they have for the MX100 and similar drives these will be very good deals in a few months as supply ramps.RU482 - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
wonder why the MX200 is 250GB/500GB/1TB when M600 is 256GB/512GB/1TBHairs_ - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
Neither of these looks like a good replacement for the mx100. The bx loses too many features and to consumers is on an "unproven" controller so it would have to be considerably cheaper, and the 200 is too much of a jump in price for what doesn't look like much more than we're already getting.The mx100 has been too good to be true for a long while I suppose, maxing out sata performance at budget prices with features like TGC Opal support, matched with the cheapest pricing around.
Maybe crucial got sick off making the rest of their lineup redundant!
They should still have announced a proper pcie drive though. No point upgrading on SATA 3 connections.
piiman - Saturday, January 10, 2015 - link
"consumers is on an "unproven" controller "But most consumers don't give a ratz azz about a controller or even what one is.
Frangelina - Sunday, January 11, 2015 - link
There is no more M550 2.5 on Crucial site. The X200 took the helm keeping the color but anonymous. However, new firmware for the M550.ace1ndahole - Tuesday, January 20, 2015 - link
Finally they got the connector and sticker on the correct side....jeezes I love crucial and owns 3 of their SSDs, m500 and mx100s, but I could never understood why in the world they decided to flip the front and back of the casing.dddnc - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
What is this DWA technology really about? Crucial states on their website that for the 500GB and 1TB MX200 drives, the DWA is "not required".Does this mean that the larger drives will never enter ghe SLC mode? I'm probably cancelling my new MX200 order because of this!
dddnc - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
Update: just saw a comprehensive review on a Dutch site. It's almost confirmed, the 500GB MX200 does NOT use DWA. The MX200 therefore becomes a boring SSD, not really different from the (now) much cheaper MX100. http://nl.hardware.info/reviews/5902/crucial-bx100... (use google translate)This is a really strange move for Crucial. They advertise DWA as being the most advanced addition to their new enthusiast SSD line, then they disable it on the most useful versions of the drives? I think I'll go with Samsung's new EVO this year.
Stefanocpp - Wednesday, March 4, 2015 - link
Hello! When is the review coming out? I've been checking the site daily for the past 2 months hoping to read your amazing review!I'm mainly interested on how the BX100 compares the MX100 since both on Amazon and on the crucial store their prices are almost identical and they could both be a nice upgrade to my trusty 2009 MacBook Pro. Thanks!