SSD prices at Microcenter dropped by about 25% over the weekend (850 EVO 500GB for $139) and Amazon and Newegg are also down a bit, I assume the NAND shortage is over? Just clearing inventory? I'm really happy to see MLC back in the mix! Time to upgrade the last of the mechanical computers...
On the bright side, it is good to see that the competition is finally catching up to samsung SATA SSDs. Be that a couple of years after they stopped developing SATA SSDs.
I think Chinese production of NAND and DRAM will be by new companies operating in new foundries. Volume production probably won't be reached until 2019, and can we really be sure of what to expect when it does?
you do know that endurance actually means warranty void if you use more than the endurance rating, MLC drives norm have endurance levels of PB of data before issues start to happen
love the BX100 for its near 0 power use when idle but it does choke a little under high load meaning i actually notice it slightly when its struggling but still its many times faster then a HDD witch can get tied up under medium loads (like windows update and store)
be nice if they can replicate that on the BX300 (should be better than the BX100 due to SLC cache and improved controller )
The NAND shortage is definitely not over. That won't abate until some time in 2018.
I couldn't say if it was clearing inventory, a short-term deal, or something else, but right now there's no reason to believe any kind of price cuts will stick.
I picked up a 480GB Muskin Reactor Armor3D for $139 _very_ recently dropped from $149. Like you, I was wondering if the NAND shortage was coming to an end, but Ryan is in a good position to know these things so maybe there's just a good deal on at the moment.
MLC or not the TLC Evo is still the better performing drive. If you're buying a ~250GB model the Evo is hands down the best option. At 500GB-1TB capacities there are a couple of cheaper options that are tempting but the Evo is still the best deal for the money IMHO until you hit 2TB class drives, where the MX300 really shines.
Got my 840 Evo when it first released and it was the last Samsung product I ever bought. I have no idea why many praise Samsung products. I had a Samsung plasma TV and two horizontal black lines appeared only after 14 months, 3 more appeared 2 months after. Then it became unwatchable. Now let's not talk about Samsung phones.
I guess you have a thing for picking bad products? Plasma (with its known shortcomings) over LCD? 840EVO when planar TLC is just about as bad as it gets? No, you can't blame this on Samsung. Granted, their products, with few exceptions, are definitely average, but so is their pricing.
"No, you can't blame this on Samsung." Haha ok. Who are you to tell me not to voice my reasons? It was my money, not yours. Who would not expect a 3D Samsung plasma TV last for at least 3 years (2 hrs/day). And who would have thought a giant SSD brand like Samsung released something like the 840 Evo. Blame or not to blame, it's not important. I'd just never buy anything from a company that would up for sale half-baked products with/without knowing their shortcomings. Did they sell some phones that exploded recently? See, this is what I'm talking about.
Until you get a Samsung blown up in face, everyone else's reasons for not buying Samsung are irrelevant.
Bug never said plasma was worse in every way. He did say it had known shortcomings, which it does - like longevity. Plasma also has some advantages, although it's dying off in favor of OLED on the high-end. With that being said, yes in this case Samsung DID sell him a lemon. Even with a plasma you should get a good few years of service, at least.
Way to assume things, buddy. I'm not a Samsung fanboy, FAR from it. I don't currently own any other Samsung products outside of their SSDs. The fact is that the 850 Evo is the king of affordable SATA SSDs, period. Sorry for not being biased and preferring a superior product despite being Samsung. The 850 Pro is better in some heavy workloads but is a lot more expensive. Although for the record the 840 Evo was actually OK, I've got a system with the last firmware released and it has been fine. The 830 was also solid.
I don't have much personal experience with their recent TVs, and I've only used their latest model phones for a few minutes here or there. Although I don't have any strong inclination to defend them as a company, I would bet your experience is rare. TVs are a crapshoot anyway. Their phones *generally* seem solid, even if I occasionally rail against them for lack of easily replaced batteries and SD card slots for some models - aside from the most obvious butt of many jokes, the last gen Note. Again, this is coming from someone who rarely buys Samsung.
Personally I am happy with their Series 6 TV from 2011, and I had no issue with their SSD-s. (Though I currently use a 256gb Crucial M550 in my notebook, which was 118 USD in 2015)
Alexvrb, are you and bug77 the same person? If not, why are you responding to chrnochime's reply meant for bug77?
It's the first I've heard (from you) that TLC is better than MLC. An TLC drive might have performance than an MLC if it has better controller. But for endurance, generally MLC is better than TLC and this is the fact. When you made a statement like "MLC or not, the TLC Evo is better...", people can only assume one thing about you. Anyway, you should have a little read about SSD tech before making such assertion.
There are people who care a lot more about RATED endurance than performance. You obviously aren't one of them, and your opinion about the EVO being best option != the truth/fact. LOL
They're also high endurance. 850 Evos have excellent endurance, and in real endurance torture testing they even exceed expectations. But feel free to spread FUD like a boss.
Sometimes it's just form factor. You may have a laptop that only has regular SATA SSD's or are upgrading to a SSD from a spinny-disk (which are decidedly awful in laptops). Or - perhaps you have a NAS or server which uses 2.5" SATA drives, or a desktop that doesn't have an M.2 slot.
The cheapest and easiest way to upgrade a conventional SATA-equipped system to an SSD is with a SATA SSD. Also M.2 is a form factor, not an interface. A lot of the entry-level / affordable M.2 drives are SATA-based. The added costs and complexities to get something substantially faster than SATA might not be worth it. Meanwhile a sub-$100 Evo drive can help revive an older system for cheap, it's the same price as competing products and it's somewhat better.
Also, if you're talking about using Clover/Tianocore with a legacy non-UEFI bios, it's kind of a mild nuisance. Especially if you're doing it for someone else on a budget. Plus you still need to use the existing mechanical clunker SATA drive (well you could add a USB stick I guess) for the BIOS to boot and load Tianocore.
Last but not least if you're talking about an older laptop, you might very well be stuck with SATA or mSATA. So might as well make the most of it. There are a lot of OEM systems with decent enough processors, saddled with horribly slow HDDs. Easy and cheap way to rev them up.
People also have concerns about life expectancy of their hard drives. As far as performance, SATA is still cheaper than PCIe, so cost plays a factor as well.
Although I'll probably NEVER hit an endrance wall with TLC NAND, since the prices for TLC and MLC in are disturbingly close at this point, I see no reason not to purchase MLC. In fact, I just bought two 240GB and one 480GB SATA SSD two weeks ago and all of them were 3D MLC because there was no difference in price. I think it might be more reasonable to ask why anyone would bother with TLC in SATA or any other form factor given the current state of the market.
Really it's quite easy... If MLC is better for endurance, and we can't find SLC anymore, without going full enterprise, anyone who engineers systems for stability will inevitably take a MLC nand storage device over a TLC, all other parts being equal. Just because you can't see a reason, doesn't mean there isn't a market for it. I guarantee you don't understand every aspect of every engineering problem that exists, which means you may not understand why a company, with shareholders, would devise such a product.
Seriously, you said it's easy to see the reason why but you kept ranting on without giving us a reason why they keep producing TLC and selling them at the same price with MLC.
You're right, I don't know every aspect of every engineering problem that exists. You don't either and, on a much smaller scale, you probably didn't read my comment closely enough to understand every aspect of it before you mistakenly assumed I'd adopted a particular viewpoint. If you read closely, you'll see we're attempting to make the same point.
If you agree that you'll never burn out a 3D TLC equipped drive, then they are both effectively equal on that front. If the MLC-equipped drives are worse performing, you've paid the same for a slower product. I think it might be more reasonable to ask why anyone would bother with a product which is saddled with an inferior controller just because it has a sticker than says "MLC!!!!oneone1eleven".
thats the thing, it is priced cheap enough, if you are a enthusiast , you might have a M.2 PCIe4 drive , but I could see myself adding a BX300 to expand storage. It just looks like great bang for buck not?
Ever heard of RAID??? It is frequently less expensive to use two or three inexpensive SATA SSDs in RAID 0 to achieve transfer rates comparable to the very expensive NVME drives. Most motherboards only have one M.2 slot, so you can't RAID the NVME M.2s. Older motherboards that lack an M.2 slot can still support SATA RAID setups.
On an older AMD motherboard, the SATA controller maxed out with 3 SSDs in RAID 0 (over 1200 MB/S). When I added a fourth SSD, performance actually declined in some tests, so I figure the controller was saturated.
Quiet impressed by the improvements , nice surprise. But why would anyone still get a mx300 <525GB capacity. Am I missing something here? Crucial always confuses me with what they want the MX vs BX to be. Or would they discontinue MX 300 <525GB , now I am curious if they will be making a MX400 still this year.
Why get <525? Because its still $90 or $60 less in total cost and if you don't need >120 or 240 GB, why not save the money. Plenty of use-cases don't need much more than just enough to boot a computer.
The ideal solution to market a product is to take a draft description from the designers, engineers, etc, and condense it to a slogan and a product segment that is palatable to the general population.
The problem seems to be the inability for marketing departments and advertising companies to adapt ideas and technology without loosing the core functions of those ideas and technology.
As you said, a lot of them just focus on price or "what works" (as in, keeping with the previous naming conventions, even if they never worked in the first place...because changing it now would admit defeat)
I've been saying this about AMD and even Intel's marketing teams for years. And who can forget NVidia's GTX 970 memory configuration flop?
The fundamental problems seems to be nobody with any engineering mentality is on a marketing team. Which is a shame, because as an engineer, I firmly believe we are good at selling (ourselves and our ideas) to management on a daily basis. And the morons in management think just like the morons in marketing.
The 545s uses 64-layer 3D TLC, while the BX300's MLC is still the first-generation 32-layer NAND. Clearly, the Intel/Micron 64L 3D NAND improves on more than just layer count. That a big part of why I suspect the BX300 may be short-lived and soon replaced by a 64L TLC product.
Great review. I've always had a soft spot for Micron. Does the BX300 contain partial power loss protection capacitors like the MX300, or are those taken out?
There are some images at the bottom of the first page of the review that show the disassembled drive case and the PCB inside. It doesn't look like power loss protection is possible given the small size of the surface mount capacitors that are present.
It's true, especially on sale, the 850 EVO is an incredible value for performance focused SATA shoppers. But if you are ok with 80-90% of the real world performance of an 850 EVO, you can get that from pretty much any modern SSD for much less. Various Sandisk drives (like the Ultra II) and even Mushkin drives are good performance, still use MLC, and are cheaper.
It might have a "horrible" wake up time, but that is still really fast and will probably not be an issue on anything at all.
The drive seems like a steal, and the only thing that it is missing is temperature throttling available in the higher end MX series. Which is also not an issue except in higher end laptops that produce a lot of heat or really small desktops with a beast of a CPU/GPU setup and not enough ventilation.
I realize they're targeting the BX300 at the lower end and for lower price points, but I'd have really loved to have seen a 960GB model.
Also, I'm really loving that the full-drive performance is close to the empty performance, unlike so many other recent drives on 1xnm TLC, Micron 3D TLC, and/or are DRAM-less.
I was trying to say that I wish Crucial had decided to make a 960GB model... but they didn't. Performance, Performance/Watt, $/GB are all great. I want a bigger drive with all those attributes.
99% of Hardware review sites always make this mistake. They always ignore the hardware that most people will have i.e. the hardware from the past 2-3 years. They just always test against the stuff they had sent them 6 months previous that most still haven't bothered to upgrade to. Most of the benches have little relevance to most users wanting to know how the new stuff compares to theirs. It's really frustrating.
I agree, I have the Bx100 and I would be interesting in a direct comparison. Even the "ssd 2015 bench" does not have the bx300 right now so I can't compare them.
Does this thing still have partial power loss protection? I don't see much in the way of capacitors in the images, at least compared to the M500 up to the MX300
Kristian seems to believe in that review there are enough caps to drive 8 NAND dies, a piece of 1.35v DDR3 DRAM, and the SMI controller, for 200us.
As an engineer, without even measuring the capacitance of the tiny inlays of that PCB, it's visually clear this is physically impossible. Just comparing to the PCB of the MX100 which has a dedicated PLP circuit and rows of caps, no matter how much power efficiency the BX100 design has over the MX100, the level of PLP is going to be entirely different, which leads me to this thread:
Basically, it's discussed that about 2-4MB of the indirection table cache (which is write-thru to the NAND by design) can be protected by the design. In other words, insignificant and irrelevant. This is why PLP was never marketed for the BX100. It's useless. Most non-enterprise implementations are.
I wouldn't call partial PLP "useless". Old SSDs wouldn't just lose SOME data. They would often lose ALL data. It would be nice to see an updated version of this test from years ago:
The M4 didn't have the partial PLP, so it would be interesting to see how much of an improvement the M500 with it's partial PLP made. For that matter, some Phison S10 drives and Samsung's last few years of models mention some form of firmware based PLP... so how effective are they?
Anyone want to start a GoFundMe for this guy to run some updated tests?
Update: I reached out to lkcl to see if he's interested in continuing the testing, and if GoFundMe would work for him. I said I would chip in $10-$20 to see some updated test results. Anyone else interested in these tests?
Samus, you didn't read carefully enough. It's not whether or not it has FULL power loss protection, but PARTIAL power loss protection. You can read anandtech's review of the BX100 for more information on what that entails. The very link you posted shows the little capacitors that are sufficient for the PARTIAL power loss protection. The reason this was even brought up is that there seem to be fewer of those capacitors on the BX300, which raised doubt as to if the feature was still included. I was just in a convo with Crucial directly, and they confirmed that the BX300 does indeed still have partial PLP.
when 3D NAND was first proposed, durability was supposed to improve because such devices could/would be built on larger nm nodes. has that actually happened? what node(s) are being used for 32/64L?
3D NAND is not really built one layer at a time. The first stage of building the memory array is to make a tall stack of alternating materials, and then vertical strings of memory cells are formed through that stack by etching deep but narrow holes and filling them with the remaining components. That high aspect ratio etching step is one of the main limiting factors in scaling layer count. If you push the layer count too far, you end up with memory cells in layers near the top of the stack having significantly different properties from the ones near the bottom of the stack.
It's relatively unlikely to have an individual layer somewhere in the middle of the stack be dead/defective across that entire layer. It's more common to see an entire vertical column fail, which involves a much smaller number of memory cells.
Congratulations Micron you're almost back to where you were 2 years ago in performance with the m550, Mx100 and mx200. I've always been a huge fan of crucial SSD's. Great bang for the buck for MLC drives. But the last year or so it's been hard to keep praising crucial.
It's an interesting move, but all in all, due to the shortage, any SATA drive will do for anyone that is looking for a switch to SSD on the desktop, while power might be the top issue for laptops.
There's the RAM caching on some of their drives which is very good all in all, especially for computers that have AMD CPUs, that can't use Intel's caching technology to speed things up.
Over two-and-a-half years ago (January 2015), I bought a 256GB MX100 for $95. That worked out to $0.371/GB, or a little less than what the BX300 is going for today ($0.375).
I would be willing to pay the same rate if it meant better performance, but using the ATSB Heavy stats in Bench, it seems that my old MX100 outperforms the BX300 in both data rate and latency. Are the 2015 ATSB Heavy stats comparable to the 2017 stats? Is it really the case that SATA SSD price/performance is worse than it was 2.5 years ago?
The average data rate and latency stats for the ATSB tests should be comparable between the 2015 and 2017 test suites. The workload didn't change, but the OS version and motherboard did. Next month or maybe late this month, I'll pull the MX100 from my gaming machine and put it through the 2017 test suite.
Thanks! I'd be super interested in a 'long-view' piece that puts some of the older flagship SSDs (X-25M, Vertex 2, MX100) through the present-day latency/consistency analysis that AT has developed. And maybe throw in that old WD Scorpio as well, not just to see how far we've come from spinning drives, but also to put the differences between SSDs in perspective!
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nathanddrews - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
SSD prices at Microcenter dropped by about 25% over the weekend (850 EVO 500GB for $139) and Amazon and Newegg are also down a bit, I assume the NAND shortage is over? Just clearing inventory? I'm really happy to see MLC back in the mix! Time to upgrade the last of the mechanical computers...ddriver - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Oh no it is not. They are gonna milk that cow until Chinese NAND gets to the market. And then they will short the price.On a side note, way to go Crucial - making quality products with MLC flash, with endurance worse than that of TLC flash. It is quite the achievement.
ddriver - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
On the bright side, it is good to see that the competition is finally catching up to samsung SATA SSDs. Be that a couple of years after they stopped developing SATA SSDs.Yojimbo - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I think Chinese production of NAND and DRAM will be by new companies operating in new foundries. Volume production probably won't be reached until 2019, and can we really be sure of what to expect when it does?leexgx - Saturday, September 2, 2017 - link
you do know that endurance actually means warranty void if you use more than the endurance rating, MLC drives norm have endurance levels of PB of data before issues start to happenlove the BX100 for its near 0 power use when idle but it does choke a little under high load meaning i actually notice it slightly when its struggling but still its many times faster then a HDD witch can get tied up under medium loads (like windows update and store)
be nice if they can replicate that on the BX300 (should be better than the BX100 due to SLC cache and improved controller )
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
The NAND shortage is definitely not over. That won't abate until some time in 2018.I couldn't say if it was clearing inventory, a short-term deal, or something else, but right now there's no reason to believe any kind of price cuts will stick.
nathanddrews - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
So what you're saying is "get it while it's hot"?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Yup.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I picked up a 480GB Muskin Reactor Armor3D for $139 _very_ recently dropped from $149. Like you, I was wondering if the NAND shortage was coming to an end, but Ryan is in a good position to know these things so maybe there's just a good deal on at the moment.Alexvrb - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
MLC or not the TLC Evo is still the better performing drive. If you're buying a ~250GB model the Evo is hands down the best option. At 500GB-1TB capacities there are a couple of cheaper options that are tempting but the Evo is still the best deal for the money IMHO until you hit 2TB class drives, where the MX300 really shines.sonny73n - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Got my 840 Evo when it first released and it was the last Samsung product I ever bought. I have no idea why many praise Samsung products. I had a Samsung plasma TV and two horizontal black lines appeared only after 14 months, 3 more appeared 2 months after. Then it became unwatchable. Now let's not talk about Samsung phones.bug77 - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
I guess you have a thing for picking bad products? Plasma (with its known shortcomings) over LCD? 840EVO when planar TLC is just about as bad as it gets?No, you can't blame this on Samsung. Granted, their products, with few exceptions, are definitely average, but so is their pricing.
sonny73n - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
"No, you can't blame this on Samsung." Haha ok. Who are you to tell me not to voice my reasons? It was my money, not yours. Who would not expect a 3D Samsung plasma TV last for at least 3 years (2 hrs/day). And who would have thought a giant SSD brand like Samsung released something like the 840 Evo. Blame or not to blame, it's not important. I'd just never buy anything from a company that would up for sale half-baked products with/without knowing their shortcomings. Did they sell some phones that exploded recently? See, this is what I'm talking about.Until you get a Samsung blown up in face, everyone else's reasons for not buying Samsung are irrelevant.
chrnochime - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Hi Samsung fanboy. You really going to say plasma is worse in every way over LCD? Ignoring the black level and response time? Okay then.Alexvrb - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Bug never said plasma was worse in every way. He did say it had known shortcomings, which it does - like longevity. Plasma also has some advantages, although it's dying off in favor of OLED on the high-end. With that being said, yes in this case Samsung DID sell him a lemon. Even with a plasma you should get a good few years of service, at least.Alexvrb - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Way to assume things, buddy. I'm not a Samsung fanboy, FAR from it. I don't currently own any other Samsung products outside of their SSDs. The fact is that the 850 Evo is the king of affordable SATA SSDs, period. Sorry for not being biased and preferring a superior product despite being Samsung. The 850 Pro is better in some heavy workloads but is a lot more expensive. Although for the record the 840 Evo was actually OK, I've got a system with the last firmware released and it has been fine. The 830 was also solid.I don't have much personal experience with their recent TVs, and I've only used their latest model phones for a few minutes here or there. Although I don't have any strong inclination to defend them as a company, I would bet your experience is rare. TVs are a crapshoot anyway. Their phones *generally* seem solid, even if I occasionally rail against them for lack of easily replaced batteries and SD card slots for some models - aside from the most obvious butt of many jokes, the last gen Note. Again, this is coming from someone who rarely buys Samsung.
tyaty1 - Thursday, August 31, 2017 - link
Personally I am happy with their Series 6 TV from 2011, and I had no issue with their SSD-s.(Though I currently use a 256gb Crucial M550 in my notebook, which was 118 USD in 2015)
sonny73n - Monday, September 4, 2017 - link
Alexvrb, are you and bug77 the same person? If not, why are you responding to chrnochime's reply meant for bug77?It's the first I've heard (from you) that TLC is better than MLC. An TLC drive might have performance than an MLC if it has better controller. But for endurance, generally MLC is better than TLC and this is the fact. When you made a statement like "MLC or not, the TLC Evo is better...", people can only assume one thing about you. Anyway, you should have a little read about SSD tech before making such assertion.
chrnochime - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
There are people who care a lot more about RATED endurance than performance. You obviously aren't one of them, and your opinion about the EVO being best option != the truth/fact. LOLAlexvrb - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
They're also high endurance. 850 Evos have excellent endurance, and in real endurance torture testing they even exceed expectations. But feel free to spread FUD like a boss.khon - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I don't get the point of this product. If you care enough of performance to get MLC NAND rather than TLC NAND, why would you get a SATA SSD ?bill.rookard - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Sometimes it's just form factor. You may have a laptop that only has regular SATA SSD's or are upgrading to a SSD from a spinny-disk (which are decidedly awful in laptops). Or - perhaps you have a NAS or server which uses 2.5" SATA drives, or a desktop that doesn't have an M.2 slot.There are lots of reasons to have a SATA option.
nathanddrews - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
True. I have a couple pre-NVME computers that need an upgrade, so that's why I go SATA.eek2121 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
1) Buy M.2 adapter card.2) Use clover to boot from NVME
3) ???
4) PROFIT!!!
Alexvrb - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
The cheapest and easiest way to upgrade a conventional SATA-equipped system to an SSD is with a SATA SSD. Also M.2 is a form factor, not an interface. A lot of the entry-level / affordable M.2 drives are SATA-based. The added costs and complexities to get something substantially faster than SATA might not be worth it. Meanwhile a sub-$100 Evo drive can help revive an older system for cheap, it's the same price as competing products and it's somewhat better.Also, if you're talking about using Clover/Tianocore with a legacy non-UEFI bios, it's kind of a mild nuisance. Especially if you're doing it for someone else on a budget. Plus you still need to use the existing mechanical clunker SATA drive (well you could add a USB stick I guess) for the BIOS to boot and load Tianocore.
Last but not least if you're talking about an older laptop, you might very well be stuck with SATA or mSATA. So might as well make the most of it. There are a lot of OEM systems with decent enough processors, saddled with horribly slow HDDs. Easy and cheap way to rev them up.
leexgx - Saturday, September 2, 2017 - link
he thinks the laptop is a PC :PMajGenRelativity - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
People also have concerns about life expectancy of their hard drives. As far as performance, SATA is still cheaper than PCIe, so cost plays a factor as well.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Although I'll probably NEVER hit an endrance wall with TLC NAND, since the prices for TLC and MLC in are disturbingly close at this point, I see no reason not to purchase MLC. In fact, I just bought two 240GB and one 480GB SATA SSD two weeks ago and all of them were 3D MLC because there was no difference in price. I think it might be more reasonable to ask why anyone would bother with TLC in SATA or any other form factor given the current state of the market.littlebitstrouds - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Really it's quite easy... If MLC is better for endurance, and we can't find SLC anymore, without going full enterprise, anyone who engineers systems for stability will inevitably take a MLC nand storage device over a TLC, all other parts being equal. Just because you can't see a reason, doesn't mean there isn't a market for it. I guarantee you don't understand every aspect of every engineering problem that exists, which means you may not understand why a company, with shareholders, would devise such a product.sonny73n - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Seriously, you said it's easy to see the reason why but you kept ranting on without giving us a reason why they keep producing TLC and selling them at the same price with MLC.BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
You're right, I don't know every aspect of every engineering problem that exists. You don't either and, on a much smaller scale, you probably didn't read my comment closely enough to understand every aspect of it before you mistakenly assumed I'd adopted a particular viewpoint. If you read closely, you'll see we're attempting to make the same point.Alexvrb - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
If you agree that you'll never burn out a 3D TLC equipped drive, then they are both effectively equal on that front. If the MLC-equipped drives are worse performing, you've paid the same for a slower product. I think it might be more reasonable to ask why anyone would bother with a product which is saddled with an inferior controller just because it has a sticker than says "MLC!!!!oneone1eleven".BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Well, I hate to sink your ship, but they're not worse performing. :)plopke - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
thats the thing, it is priced cheap enough, if you are a enthusiast , you might have a M.2 PCIe4 drive , but I could see myself adding a BX300 to expand storage. It just looks like great bang for buck not?MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
It does seem like it is priced wellAlexvrb - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Except at 1TB-2TB range. Then the ADATA SU900 and MX300 are worth a look. Especially if you're using it for secondary storage only.Lolimaster - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
NVME basically offers you higher max transfer which helps when working/and or moving huge files.What most people actually complain about TLC is sustained transfers when the SLC cache depletes.
bug77 - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Motherboards have a lot more SATA connectors than they have NVMe. That may have something to do with it.doylecc - Friday, November 3, 2017 - link
Ever heard of RAID??? It is frequently less expensive to use two or three inexpensive SATA SSDs in RAID 0 to achieve transfer rates comparable to the very expensive NVME drives. Most motherboards only have one M.2 slot, so you can't RAID the NVME M.2s. Older motherboards that lack an M.2 slot can still support SATA RAID setups.On an older AMD motherboard, the SATA controller maxed out with 3 SSDs in RAID 0 (over 1200 MB/S). When I added a fourth SSD, performance actually declined in some tests, so I figure the controller was saturated.
ImSpartacus - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Did I miss the performance consistency section? I always like that.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
We're still finalizing that for the new testbed.plopke - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Quiet impressed by the improvements , nice surprise. But why would anyone still get a mx300 <525GB capacity. Am I missing something here? Crucial always confuses me with what they want the MX vs BX to be.Or would they discontinue MX 300 <525GB , now I am curious if they will be making a MX400 still this year.
wallysb01 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Why get <525? Because its still $90 or $60 less in total cost and if you don't need >120 or 240 GB, why not save the money. Plenty of use-cases don't need much more than just enough to boot a computer.vladx - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
So MX300 is using TLC NAND while BX300 is now MLC? What the hell is going on with Micron/Crucial's marketing team?MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
To be fair to Micron/Crucial, it seems like par for the course for marketing teams to confuse peoplemelgross - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Most people don’t care. They look at capacity, price, and maybe, performance. How the company gets there isn’t important.Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
The ideal solution to market a product is to take a draft description from the designers, engineers, etc, and condense it to a slogan and a product segment that is palatable to the general population.The problem seems to be the inability for marketing departments and advertising companies to adapt ideas and technology without loosing the core functions of those ideas and technology.
As you said, a lot of them just focus on price or "what works" (as in, keeping with the previous naming conventions, even if they never worked in the first place...because changing it now would admit defeat)
Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
I've been saying this about AMD and even Intel's marketing teams for years. And who can forget NVidia's GTX 970 memory configuration flop?The fundamental problems seems to be nobody with any engineering mentality is on a marketing team. Which is a shame, because as an engineer, I firmly believe we are good at selling (ourselves and our ideas) to management on a daily basis. And the morons in management think just like the morons in marketing.
msabercr - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Are we sure this is MLC? It seems an aweful lot like the intel 545s which is TLC.Ian Cutress - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Yes, we are sure.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
The 545s uses 64-layer 3D TLC, while the BX300's MLC is still the first-generation 32-layer NAND. Clearly, the Intel/Micron 64L 3D NAND improves on more than just layer count. That a big part of why I suspect the BX300 may be short-lived and soon replaced by a 64L TLC product.Naris17 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Great review. I've always had a soft spot for Micron. Does the BX300 contain partial power loss protection capacitors like the MX300, or are those taken out?BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
There are some images at the bottom of the first page of the review that show the disassembled drive case and the PCB inside. It doesn't look like power loss protection is possible given the small size of the surface mount capacitors that are present.vladx - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
BX series always lacked PLP, that's why it was considered lower-tier while performance was not far away.nwarawa - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Incorrect. The BX100 most definitely did. I even confirmed with Crucial themselves.nwarawa - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
In fact, you can even look at Anandtech's earlier review of the BX100 if you don't believe me:http://www.anandtech.com/show/9144/crucial-bx100-1...
nwarawa - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
I was just in a chat with Crucial directly: they say the BX300 does indeed have partial power-loss protection.Glock24 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Finally something worth buying besides the 850Evo, but only of they keep the prices low.vladx - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
There are a lot of good alternatives to 850 EVO, most of the times the slightly higher performance is not worth the premium.Glock24 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Can you list them? All other drives are notably slower while costing as much as the 850 Evo, others are even more expensive.This BX300 performs very close to the 850 Evo while being slightly cheaper (although smaller capacity too).
Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
It's true, especially on sale, the 850 EVO is an incredible value for performance focused SATA shoppers. But if you are ok with 80-90% of the real world performance of an 850 EVO, you can get that from pretty much any modern SSD for much less. Various Sandisk drives (like the Ultra II) and even Mushkin drives are good performance, still use MLC, and are cheaper.m16 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
It might have a "horrible" wake up time, but that is still really fast and will probably not be an issue on anything at all.The drive seems like a steal, and the only thing that it is missing is temperature throttling available in the higher end MX series. Which is also not an issue except in higher end laptops that produce a lot of heat or really small desktops with a beast of a CPU/GPU setup and not enough ventilation.
MrCommunistGen - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I realize they're targeting the BX300 at the lower end and for lower price points, but I'd have really loved to have seen a 960GB model.Also, I'm really loving that the full-drive performance is close to the empty performance, unlike so many other recent drives on 1xnm TLC, Micron 3D TLC, and/or are DRAM-less.
damianrobertjones - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
There's a 1tb model?Wubinator - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
No there isn'thttp://www.crucial.com/usa/en/ssd/series--BX300?cm...
MrCommunistGen - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
I was trying to say that I wish Crucial had decided to make a 960GB model... but they didn't. Performance, Performance/Watt, $/GB are all great. I want a bigger drive with all those attributes.creed3020 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Great review Billy! Consistent execution on the writing and the newer format graphs are a nice refresh for the SSD review format. Keep these coming.I still wish the MX100 was in the charts to get a better grasp on the generational changes.
jabber - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
99% of Hardware review sites always make this mistake. They always ignore the hardware that most people will have i.e. the hardware from the past 2-3 years. They just always test against the stuff they had sent them 6 months previous that most still haven't bothered to upgrade to. Most of the benches have little relevance to most users wanting to know how the new stuff compares to theirs. It's really frustrating.ComputerGuy2006 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
I agree, I have the Bx100 and I would be interesting in a direct comparison. Even the "ssd 2015 bench" does not have the bx300 right now so I can't compare them.Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
Lucky, the BX100 was an amazing value back in the day (hah, 2 years ago) and still holds up.MrSpadge - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
A budget drive with budget price, without any real weakness - well done!nwarawa - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Does this thing still have partial power loss protection? I don't see much in the way of capacitors in the images, at least compared to the M500 up to the MX300Ryan Smith - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
No, it does not. The BX series always omits that feature.nwarawa - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
"The BX series always omits that feature."Incorrect. The BX100 most definitely did. I even confirmed with Crucial themselves.
Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
BX100 PCB: http://www.storagereview.com/images/StorageReview-...No power loss protection.
BX series has never offered it. If Micron/Crucial said otherwise, they lied.
Samus - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
Here is a high-res shot from AT: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9144/IMG_2266.jpgKristian seems to believe in that review there are enough caps to drive 8 NAND dies, a piece of 1.35v DDR3 DRAM, and the SMI controller, for 200us.
As an engineer, without even measuring the capacitance of the tiny inlays of that PCB, it's visually clear this is physically impossible. Just comparing to the PCB of the MX100 which has a dedicated PLP circuit and rows of caps, no matter how much power efficiency the BX100 design has over the MX100, the level of PLP is going to be entirely different, which leads me to this thread:
This thread has a good definition of "power loss protection" on the BX100: http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/Crucial-...
Basically, it's discussed that about 2-4MB of the indirection table cache (which is write-thru to the NAND by design) can be protected by the design. In other words, insignificant and irrelevant. This is why PLP was never marketed for the BX100. It's useless. Most non-enterprise implementations are.
nwarawa - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
I wouldn't call partial PLP "useless". Old SSDs wouldn't just lose SOME data. They would often lose ALL data. It would be nice to see an updated version of this test from years ago:http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html
The M4 didn't have the partial PLP, so it would be interesting to see how much of an improvement the M500 with it's partial PLP made. For that matter, some Phison S10 drives and Samsung's last few years of models mention some form of firmware based PLP... so how effective are they?
Anyone want to start a GoFundMe for this guy to run some updated tests?
nwarawa - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
Update: I reached out to lkcl to see if he's interested in continuing the testing, and if GoFundMe would work for him. I said I would chip in $10-$20 to see some updated test results. Anyone else interested in these tests?nwarawa - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
Samus, you didn't read carefully enough. It's not whether or not it has FULL power loss protection, but PARTIAL power loss protection. You can read anandtech's review of the BX100 for more information on what that entails. The very link you posted shows the little capacitors that are sufficient for the PARTIAL power loss protection. The reason this was even brought up is that there seem to be fewer of those capacitors on the BX300, which raised doubt as to if the feature was still included. I was just in a convo with Crucial directly, and they confirmed that the BX300 does indeed still have partial PLP.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
when 3D NAND was first proposed, durability was supposed to improve because such devices could/would be built on larger nm nodes. has that actually happened? what node(s) are being used for 32/64L?lilmoe - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Question. This is provably unlikely, but is binning layers possible?lilmoe - Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - link
Probably*Billy Tallis - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
3D NAND is not really built one layer at a time. The first stage of building the memory array is to make a tall stack of alternating materials, and then vertical strings of memory cells are formed through that stack by etching deep but narrow holes and filling them with the remaining components. That high aspect ratio etching step is one of the main limiting factors in scaling layer count. If you push the layer count too far, you end up with memory cells in layers near the top of the stack having significantly different properties from the ones near the bottom of the stack.It's relatively unlikely to have an individual layer somewhere in the middle of the stack be dead/defective across that entire layer. It's more common to see an entire vertical column fail, which involves a much smaller number of memory cells.
Radio-Zone - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Thanks for the information!!!Ej24 - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Congratulations Micron you're almost back to where you were 2 years ago in performance with the m550, Mx100 and mx200. I've always been a huge fan of crucial SSD's. Great bang for the buck for MLC drives. But the last year or so it's been hard to keep praising crucial.m16 - Sunday, September 3, 2017 - link
It's an interesting move, but all in all, due to the shortage, any SATA drive will do for anyone that is looking for a switch to SSD on the desktop, while power might be the top issue for laptops.There's the RAM caching on some of their drives which is very good all in all, especially for computers that have AMD CPUs, that can't use Intel's caching technology to speed things up.
keta - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
Over two-and-a-half years ago (January 2015), I bought a 256GB MX100 for $95. That worked out to $0.371/GB, or a little less than what the BX300 is going for today ($0.375).I would be willing to pay the same rate if it meant better performance, but using the ATSB Heavy stats in Bench, it seems that my old MX100 outperforms the BX300 in both data rate and latency. Are the 2015 ATSB Heavy stats comparable to the 2017 stats? Is it really the case that SATA SSD price/performance is worse than it was 2.5 years ago?
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
The average data rate and latency stats for the ATSB tests should be comparable between the 2015 and 2017 test suites. The workload didn't change, but the OS version and motherboard did. Next month or maybe late this month, I'll pull the MX100 from my gaming machine and put it through the 2017 test suite.keta - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
Thanks! I'd be super interested in a 'long-view' piece that puts some of the older flagship SSDs (X-25M, Vertex 2, MX100) through the present-day latency/consistency analysis that AT has developed. And maybe throw in that old WD Scorpio as well, not just to see how far we've come from spinning drives, but also to put the differences between SSDs in perspective!Lolimaster - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link
And now in Peru you can find the BX300 120GB for $35 xD.