The Crucial BX200 (480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Crucial's First TLC NAND SSD
by Billy Tallis on November 3, 2015 9:00 AM ESTIdle Power Consumption
Many SATA drives are getting close to the limits of what our equipment can measure for power consumption. It's hard to build a meter than has sub-milliwatt accuracy and can withstand the high peak currents drawn by devices like high-performance PCIe drives. Our test rig can't measure the deepest power saving modes (DevSlp), but we can look for any red flags that the intermediate modes aren't working.
The BX200 joins the club of drives than are very poor at managing power without DevSlp support. Its active power consumption and poor efficiency are enough to exclude it from being useful for laptops, so idle power isn't as important, but it's another disapointment.
TRIM Validation
A drive that didn't correctly implement the ATA TRIM command would be very surprising to find today, but it's a quick enough check. The trimcheck tool creates and then deletes a file on the disk, and later checks if the contents of the file are still accessible. In addition to verifying that TRIM is working correctly, this test also demonstrates that, for better or worse, files that are deleted cannot be easily recovered.
Nothing about the drive is completely broken, and TRIM does indeed work.
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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 wellcoconutboy - 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.