The Crucial BX200 (480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Crucial's First TLC NAND SSD
by Billy Tallis on November 3, 2015 9:00 AM ESTPerformance Consistency
Starting things off, our performance consistency test saturates the drive with 4kB random writes for a full hour, with a queue depth of 32, the maximum supported by the AHCI protocol used by SATA and most PCIe drives. This puts the drive's controller under maximum stress and writes enough data to exhaust all free space and spare area on the drive. This is an unrealistic workload for any client use, but it provides a worst-case scenario for long-term heavy use, and it sheds light on how different SSD controllers behave and if their performance will hold up as they fill up.
The average of the last 400 seconds of the test gives us a steady-state IOPS rating that is usually very different from what the manufacturer specifies for a new, empty drive. We also quantify the consistency of the drive's random write performance, and provide plots of the performance over the course of the test.
The BX200 is off to a poor start, with very low steady-state IOPS where the BX100 managed to place closer to the middle of the pack.
The BX200's consistency is also at the bottom of the chart, indicating that there's wide variability between its best and worst performance even after entering steady-state.
For a brief moment, the BX200 performs almost as advertised, and then for a few minutes it performs well for a budget drive, but when it runs out of cache and spare area, performance hits the floor.
Save for the periodic but infrequent excursions to 9k IOPS and 20-25k IOPS, the BX200's steady-state hovers between 200 and 700 IOPS: better than a hard drive, but not what we want to see from a SSD.
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paulgj - Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - link
I see the MU02 firmware for this drive is out, are there any plans to retest?LarsBars - Tuesday, February 2, 2016 - link
The BX200's are getting cheap now, and they have a new firmware update, MU02. Any chance that you could re-run the BX200's through the tests and see if anything is improved? Thanks!Amoro - Monday, April 11, 2016 - link
I don't see the point since it only states stability/reliability improvements and doesn't mention anything about performance.Release Date: 1/12/2016
Corrected SMART attribute threshold values
Improved general reliability and stability
Minor Bug Fixes and general reliability and stability Improvements
freddell - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
I dont know how your IO tests throughput numbers are so high compared to MX100 or MX200. As soon as I tried to clone a 1TB drive for my wifes laptop the write speed dropped to 60 MB/s or less, clearly slower than the HDD it was meant to replace. BX is a truly horrible drive for write performance, I will not recommend to anyone. I dont know why it was not highlighted in your review.dh33r4j - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
I got the 480GB for £73 ($95) during lightning sale from Amazon. When the price is right, I think it becomes worth it. For someone moving from a HDD to SSD, I coudn't say no to the offer.