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  • Shadow7037932 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    That's kind of disappointing, esp. the 250GB version as it's only a little cheaper than the 850 EVO. However, the 960GB assuming sales/deals, go down to $230-250 in the coming months, I can see people buying it to replace HDDs for say storing games.
  • eek2121 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    That's MSRP for the BX200. The street prices will probably be much cheaper.
  • Samus - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    For the price your still better off with the OCZ ARC100 with toshiba MLC and. Barefoot3 controller.
  • LB-ID - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Toshiba's still selling things under the OCZ name? It long since needed to die and go away.
  • Lazlo Panaflex - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link

    +1 to that. Lots of people got burned by bad OCZ drives. Pretty dumb of Toshiba to keep calling them that.
  • tamalero - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link

    Reminds me of Hitachi when they bough the IBM dextar drives.
    anyone remembers the horrible failures of the 10k and 15k rpm drives under IBM?
    even their consumer disks were dying like mad.
    They sold their business to Hitachi who fixed the mess.
    did this happen to Toshiba and the OCZ drives?
  • leexgx - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    the poor power use on that drive is very bad (why i got the BX100 as it has overall best lowest power usage under almost all loads) BX100 is not the fastest SSD drive around but BX200 for £10 more is not good, same with the MX200 as well
  • coconutboy - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    For several months now, on a near-weekly basis, Samsung Evo drives are hitting sale prices of ~$150 for 500GB and $75 for 250GB. Except for customers not paying attention, Crucial is gonna have a tough time moving these bx200 when there's unproven reliability, almost no price advantage, and a huge performance deficit.

    Crucial needs to drop their msrp or cut retailers a deal to lower street prices.
  • eek2121 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    You are comparing MSRP to street prices. Most of the SSDs in that list are running at least $20 (and sometimes much more) below MSRP. I'm betting $0.25-$0.27 per gig once these things see widespread availability. Don't be surprised if this drive causes price brackets to move again. 480/512 where the 256 was, 960/1tb where the 512 was, etc.
  • The_Assimilator - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    It bloody well *better* move price brackets, since it's apparently not good for much else.
  • melgross - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Not true. If you put music and video files on this, it's perfectly adequate.
  • garbagedisposal - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    That doesn't mean anything. A hard drive would work beautifully for music and video too
  • petteyg359 - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    Not if the drive motor is louder than the music...
  • LB-ID - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Why in the world would you be using a space-limited, relatively expensive SSD for storage like that when you could get MUCH better price/performance ratio out of a mechanical drive?
  • SmokingCrop - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Simple, the horrible noise that comes out of mechanical drives. It's definitely the loudest thing in my system.
  • Pissedoffyouth - Sunday, November 8, 2015 - link

    You could definitely hear the hard drive on my old PC, but my WD Reds are damn silent in my new one. Can't hear them at all. Only by holding the caser you can feel the slight vibration
  • tamalero - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link

    you must have one hell of a horrible computer case or using very old mechanical drives to hear that.
  • squngy - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link

    Either that, or premium silent fans...

    If you build a system with the intent of keeping it as quite as possible and are willing to spend some extra money and or sacrifice some performance then you will hear mechanical drives over other components at least occasionally (seek and spinup).
  • nagi603 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link

    Your case must be an old, cheap one, or one not particularly designed for home use. (Or you are missing the side panel.) Try one that comes with mechanical decoupling groumets, like every decent case for more than a couple years back. E.g.: Antec or Fractal Design cases. Or go el-cheapo and just suspend the HDD with bungie cord in the 5.25" slots. Voila, no more noise.
  • royalcrown - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    Try dropping your external mechanical HDD while on, then try it with an SSD and see...

    one thing you needn't worry about is moving your system while it's on with ssd, (or bumping it)
  • ilkhan - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    If a company is going to shoot for the value proposition, they really need to beat samsung by more than 10%. Paying an extra 10% to get a really solid drive like the 850EVO is just too tempting for anyone who does even the tiniest of research before buying.
    You either need to be the cheapest, best name brand recognition, or fastest. Crucial isn't any of those on the 250GB market.
  • AnnonymousCoward - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link

    Crucial has better quality and is a U.S. company. You shouldn't give Samung so much credit.
  • squngy - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link

    What does the county of the home office got to do with anything?
  • Samus - Friday, February 19, 2016 - link

    Support. Samsungs is a joke. Fortunately the 840 Evo is the only drive they've botched. Crucial has excellent support and an excellent track record to go with their products. Shows good QA. Wouldn't expect anything else from an Intel subsidiary.
  • zeeBomb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    What's the difference between TLC NAND to MLC or SLC NAND again?
  • Beararam - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/flash-data-cente...
  • dakishimesan - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/6337/samsung-ssd-840...
  • coconutboy - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    slc = premium, reliable, fast, expensive, etc
    mlc = middle ground
    tlc = cheap, lowest reliability, but Samsung has gotten tlc quality up to a level sufficient for most non-enterprise users

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_cell
  • zeeBomb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Okay awesome, thanks.
  • FalcomPSX - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    SLC NAND stores one bit per flash cell. MLC stores two bits per cell. and TLC stores three bits per cell.
  • zeeBomb - Sunday, November 8, 2015 - link

    Less bits the better?
  • Dahak - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    So I had primarily just skimmed the article, but for a successor to the BX100 its not.
    I wonder if there is some firmware bug that might be causing an issue.

    I have used the BX100s fine in general office settings, but i many need to pass on these and start to look for an alternative
  • mczak - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Honestly I think the BX200 as a cheap SSD makes sense. The problem with the BX100 was that it was "too good". There was just about no difference in performance to the MX200 (faster in some benchmarks even), there was some feature differences (for instance no AES encryption, albeit this seems to have been an artificial firmware limitation as the controller supports it) but who cares about that in client ssds. But on the downside, there was just about no price difference to the MX200 neither, some shops selling some capacities of the BX100 actually for more than the same capacities for the MX200 sometimes. So the Crucial BX100 and MX200 were really pretty much the same in nearly all aspects.
    But with BX200 this changes - the MX200 now clearly is the better product, but the BX200 definitely is cheaper (or at least retail prices really need to be cheaper). Albeit the benchmarks are definitely concerning - even with tlc nand it shouldn't be THAT bad, maybe indeed the firmware is to blame.
  • hojnikb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Actually, TLC is pretty bad and is mostly the sole reason why this drive performs so badly. Remove the SLC cache and it would be much worse (especially on paper).
  • mczak - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    I don't quite agree. There's other tlc nand ssds in the benchmarks. Even if you exclude the 850 Evo (with its 3d nand) there's still the (toshiba tlc nand based) ocz trion 100. And this performs quite ok - sure it's not exactly leading but it doesn't trail by huge amounts in some benchmarks like the bx200 does. I'd have expected the bx200 to perform close to that rather than a league of its own as far as slow ssds go... I don't know though if that's due to differences between toshiba tlc and micron tlc or if that's due to controllers.
  • Drumsticks - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    It can't be *just* the NAND. The other TLC based drives in the charts perform much closer to "mainstream" than "absolutely terrible at everything"
  • hojnikb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    its pretty hard to make good tlc. so yeah, tlc from micron simply sux. no other way around it.

    its no controllers fault, as it should perform just fine on its own, since its based off *46
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Assuming the street price does settle in at a reasonable discount to MSRP (and thus is cheaper than most other budget drives), these look like a reasonable option for office work. It look ~4 minutes of sustained full writes for the 480GB model to choke. Outside of photo/video editing the only time a normal user is going to hit that long of a sustained write is for OS or very large software installs. The rest of the time, most writes will be a few seconds at most before an idle period gives the drive time to catch up and flush the ram/SLC caches; meaning they should mostly sit in the (short) burst where the drives IO is similar to what much higher end drives achieve; and most longer operations will still fit in the middle plateau which is similar in performance to most budget drives on the market.
  • beginner99 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Too expensive or too low performance. I think everyone can afford that $20 to step up to a MX200 or similar. And this $20 is more than worth it given the extra performance. Off topic but I would also like how older SSDs fare in these benches just as a comparison. Say I have an intel G2, will I actually gain anything noticeable from moving to a new SSD?
  • Mangosteen - Thursday, November 5, 2015 - link

    Yup! You can go to anandtechs excellent bench:

    http://anandtech.com/bench/SSD/65

    The 2013 benchmarks include a "Intel X25-M G2 160GB" (or the 80GB) which is what I'm going to assume is an Intel G2.

    You can compare 1 to 1 with any SSD for example with a 250GB 850 Evo you see big gains just about everywhere, so you will definitely gain performance but will that actually be noticeable to you i have no idea because it depends on what you will use it for. For sure it won't be AS big a gap as going from a HDD to an SSD was but you may notice some small gains. It's hilarious because in the overall listing of all the ssd's there is a "Velociraptor 10,000 rpm" HDD to compare to the SSD's which is awesome. Keep in mind also that you get a new (probably better) warranty and a larger guaranteed durability.
  • extide - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    So, apparently the first "bad" crucial SSD. Oh wait, no, the second one, remember that V4 or whatever it was, heh.
  • hojnikb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    This is miles ahead V4, because this is usable, while V4 was not.
  • iLovefloss - Sunday, November 8, 2015 - link

    Nah, Crucial still had their M4 which quite a few issues for many people.
  • Glock24 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Wow, didn't expect such a product from Crucial. The only other SSD that performs worse than a mechanical disk is the Kingston SSD V300 that is still being sold.
  • hojnikb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    V300, despite its hate, is still *much* faster than any HDD out there.
  • Glock24 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Maybe you got lucky, but I bought one after reading some good reviews (before the nand change fiasco hit the news) and after a while I noticed something was wrong because of the painfully slow performance. It was giving me reads close to 100MB/s and writes on the 20MB/s range, and that's sequential performance. I usually do not notice any difference in tel world performance between different SSD models, but with the V300 was very notorious. Even the HDD I had in use at the time felt faster (Spinpoint F1 1TB). So no, the V300 is not faster than any HDD.
  • hojnikb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    that was a faulty model or issue on your end. eve the crappiest models were good for atleast 75mbs of write....
  • Gigaplex - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    And most hard drives these days can beat 75MB/s sequential write.
  • hojnikb - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    sequential speeds matter very little, its the random performace that makes ssds fast. and those are orders of magnitude better, even with v300
  • jabber - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Yeah I use V300's exclusively in SATA II based PCs and laptops as they will push 270MBps+ all day long. No point buying 850 EVOs there. Must have bought 50+ and all of them are still going strong.
  • extide - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    You guys made a typo on page 8, under "Mixed Sequential Read/Write Performance" -- you duplicated "duplicating" heh
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Ironic. Thanks.
  • NeonFlak - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    1tb Mushkin Reactor for less than $300 any day over this.
  • MikhailT - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Is it me or is Crucial messing up lately with regressed successors? MX100 was great but MX200 was not that great and BX100/BX200 is even worse. It would've been better for them to just keep MX100 and drop prices over time.

    Crucial is basically just convincing me to switch to Samsung next time.
  • leexgx - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    BX100 was very good for laptops, very low power use even when under load
    BX200 is slower and use crap load more power , the TLC drives are just not worth the £10 cheaper price
  • LarsBars - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    I've heard AnandTech say in the past, "It doesn't matter which brand of SSD you go with- just that you go with SSD."

    It looks like the BX200 means we need to be more vigilant about which SSDs we buy.
  • JimmiG - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    It wouldn't be terrible if it was a bit cheaper. If the price drops over the next couple of months (which usually happens with SSD's), it would be great as a "secondary SSD", especially the 960GB model. However at the current prices, you're better off paying a tiny bit more for much better performance and endurance.
  • Hulk - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    I don't understand. Same endurance as the BX100 series using the same process size yet this is TLC vs. MLC for the BX100?

    While the performance is not great I could see this for media storage if the price is right. And by right I mean $200/TB.
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    The endurance ratings for warranty purposes are only loosely connected to the actual P/E cycle count, and are usually pretty conservative. Plus, the BX200 does have the benefit of more sophisticated error correction.
  • jabber - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    Time to buy up the clearance BX100s!
  • paulgj - Monday, November 9, 2015 - link

    I just ordered a couple more BX100's 250GB
  • doggface - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    The MX100 was just brilliant, an easy recommendation.The BX100 has been my go to value SSD, that l I recommended to many friends. The bx200 is garbage which costs more? And is about as bad as a HDD. What the hell crucial. What the hell.
  • Luke212 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    BX100 and MX100 were great.... how can they go backward so badly?
  • JDG1980 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link

    It's looking more and more as though TLC is a big flop. It doesn't seem to provide substantial price savings, and it comes at a considerable cost in performance, durability, and reliability.

    For a TLC drive to be worth it, it would need to be 1/2 to 1/4 the cost per gigabyte of a MLC solution on the largest drives. It then might be acceptable for people who want moderately priced bulk storage that's cheaper than standard SSDs. But that's not close to being the case now, and it may never be.
  • CiccioB - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    Yeah, I still wonder if TLC is really reliable as producers advertise them.
    Samsung needed a "hack" to their 840 TLC series to solve data retention problems reducing life time.
    We do not know if others have done the same without (obviously) telling publicly. And if 850 series has it under the hood.
    I would go to MLC drives for few $ more. I feel them as more reliable and durable. And "feeling" is an important thing for me, as I put my data on them and saving few bucks may not really be an advantage when a TLC drive lives less then a MLC one.
    For performance, I bet anyone to be able to discern differences in real life form an SSD to another. This are "synthetic" tests, where source of data is faster than SSD speed (RAM). For whatever real usage, anything comes from sources that are slower (HDD, network, optical disks). Load times into RAM is limited, as you don't usually load GB and GB into it but during a benchmark.
    What it really matters is reliability, durability and price. TLC fails to make me comfortable with the first two criteria. Which, for me, are the most important ones.
  • CiccioB - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    "This are "synthetic" tests"
    These are synthetic tests.

    Edit button, please!
  • extide - Thursday, November 5, 2015 - link

    Yeah it seems like you really need to go to 3D NAND to get decent TLC -- the 850 EVO's have so far been pretty much great. That significantly larger feature size really helps the TLC out.
  • Beaver M. - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    No wonder I have been skipping reviews of new SATA SSDs for a few years now. Nothing can touch the Samsung ones, and thats sad.
  • ghanz - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    Review request: Please do a review of Sandisk Plus, their current lowest tier SSDs available in 120gb and 240gb capacities.
    Will be interesting to see how those compares to the BX100 and BX200 in similar capacities.
  • Mugur - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    I must buy another BX100 until the stocks will dry...
  • redzo - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    It's a disaster. I think that Crucial was better of not releasing the damn thing. What were they thinking? The performance gap is huge compared to samsung's evo. This product just shows that samsung rules TLC. All educated buyers will think twice before purchasing it even at 15/20$ lower than this.
  • KAlmquist - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    What makes it a disaster is that Crucial is replacing a successful product (the BX100) with this thing. Keep the BX100 around, give the new drive a designation like AX100, market it as a budget alternative to the BX100, and the drive might be a modest success.

    When the BX100 disappears, that will leave the Samsung 850 EVO as the paradigm of the SATA SSD sweet spot, with good balance of performance, quality, and attractive pricing.
  • paulgj - Monday, November 9, 2015 - link

    They should name it the BX50 :-)
  • tabascosauz - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    The BX200 should be compared to the SP550 from ADATA. Both are budget drives, both SM2256 (which has left a much crappier first impression than the actually promising SM2246EN), both TLC, yet the SP550 does better as a budget drive.
  • KAlmquist - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link

    Yup. I would be excited about the performance of the BX200 if I worked for ADATA.
  • Dritman - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link

    This is actually embarrassing, to put this product into today's market, at any price. You cannot step backwards THIS far.

    A crap review is like one of the cheap OCZ drives, except they're understandably bad, because they're so cheap and kinda in line with the price.

    With this thing though, it's much worse than anyone could have imagined.
  • bennyg - Tuesday, November 10, 2015 - link

    80mb/s sequential write is not that bad in a SSD. If it were made in 2009.
  • TonyCL6 - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link

    The comparison chart should add Samsung 840EVO (planer 19nm TLC) and ADATA SP550 (planer Hynix 16nm TLC) to be more meaningful. It helps users understand the sustain Seq. write (after pSLC cache ran out) performance differences between planer TLC of Samsung 19nm, Toshiba 19nm, Hynix 16nm and Micron 16nm.
  • Kutark - Sunday, November 15, 2015 - link

    Can someone answer a question for me. It says these are capable of roughly 500MB/s read and write, however SATA3 obviously saturates around 200. Are those figures for m.2 PCIE versions of the drive or? Cus I see them advertised for the 2.5" SATA drives and im a little confused.

    I was about to build a skylake setup as a Christmas gift to myself, however I was looking at some of the NVMe drives etc, to get better perf than SATA3 can offer, however, they're significantly more expensive per GB. So, if I can get something with a sustained 500 read/write like this, (or maybe a "pro" version, i.e. non NVME) I'd rather save the money, as realistically in a gamer situation the difference between 500mb/s and 1000 is gonna be negligible.
  • NJCompguy - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link

    Despite the abysmal performance of this drive, it's still light years faster then a 5400RPM mechanical drive. I picked up this drive (240GB version) for $65.00 - it made my friends laptop feel brand new after installing a fresh copy of Windows 10. She could not have been happier with this drive. People to often get caught up in the technical details and lose sight of the "big picture" of upgrading from a slow hard drive to an SSD. This drive is perfect for those that just want a laptop to boot up quicker.
  • 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.

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