The Crucial BX200 (480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Crucial's First TLC NAND SSD
by Billy Tallis on November 3, 2015 9:00 AM ESTATTO - Transfer Size vs Performance
ATTO provides a quick and easy test of performance over a range of block sizes, which makes it a good overview of performance. It usually illustrates quite clearly how performance plateaus as transfer size increases, with reads bumping up against the limits of SATA but writes being limited by the speed of the flash itself.
Both capacities of the BX200 produce some of the oddest ATTO plots I've seen. Read performance scales up in a mostly normal fashion, but write performance is all over the place. ATTO alternates between reads and writes, so the drive was not under sustained long-term write pressure but was nevertheless wildly inconsistent. This test is pretty short, but still long enough for the BX200 to run into trouble.
AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Performance
Drives that perform transparent compression will perform much worse on this test than during the Iometer tests. The SandForce controllers that relied heavily on compression are much less popular (having been largely displaced by controllers from Silicon Motion, Marvell, and Phison), but this in still an important metric to keep in the suite. Many real-world sources of bulk data (such as encoded video) are already heavily compressed and cannot benefit from any attempts at further compression. Like the ATTO test, this is a fairly short test so it is more representative of peak performance than sustained performance.
The BX200 had no trouble on the Iometer sequential read test, so it's no surprise that it handles the AS-SSD read test well.
The BX200's write performance on this short test is not great but it is adequate. It's hard to tell whether it suffered a performance crash for a small portion of the test of if this was a case of slow-ish but steady performance and the short duration saved the drive from further embarrassment.
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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.