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  • Hulk - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Wow, that validates all of the other reviews I've been reading about this drive. Great performance, great value, and no TLC NAND worries. I'm getting one for my new laptop.
  • Uplink10 - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    If you want a great value you better wait for a few months (maybe more than a few) till 3D NAND drives are going to come out from SanDisk, Micron, Intel, Toshiba. Then Samsing will not be the only company with 3D NAND drives and prices will probably going to come down.
  • Harry_Wild - Saturday, April 25, 2015 - link

    Thanks for the info! I will wait it out to get the best 3D NAND drives.
  • Hace - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    I'm kinda surprised you didn't draw more attention to the 850 EVO as a competitor, which is neck-in-neck with pricing.
  • digiguy - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Yes, similar value for the money, and definitely more than the 840 EVO....
  • Kristian Vättö - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    I have to admit that I totally overlooked the 850 EVO as I was kinda assuming that its price would be higher. I put this review together on a very short notice as Ryan couldn't get the MacBook review finished for today, hence my mistake of not paying enough attention to the prices (even though I updated the table today...). Anyway, I've updated the conclusion to take the 850 EVO into account because as you said, the pricing is very close and it does provide a little higher performance.
  • Hulk - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    While the 850EVO is definitely a competitor for the BX100 the fact that it uses TLC NAND vs. MLC for the BX100 is a big deal for many people who aren't as yet convinced the 850EVO won't be affected by the read issue that is still a problem with the 840EVO. I realize the cell size for the 850 EVO's 3D NAND is much greater but as I wrote above many people, myself included, don't see the need to roll the dice on the 850EVO when the BX100 will provide basically similar performance.
  • just4U - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    The 850Evo is $20-$50 more on all models here in Canada. Not sure what stateside or Euro Pricing is like.
  • Margalus - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    I just bought a 1TB EVO for $350 on Amazon, USA
  • repoman27 - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    Kristian, hopefully you'll be helping Ryan with that MacBook review by covering the NVMe(!) SSD it ships with in depth. Looks to be a PCIe 2.0 x4 connected device dubbed "AP0256H", so possibly a semi-custom Apple controller based on the Marvell 88SS1093.
  • Kristian Vättö - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    We've run some basic tests, but nothing too in-depth for the review. Testing an internal drive is a bit more complicated, but hopefully we'll be able to follow up with more thorough testing once we get the initial review out.
  • repoman27 - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    Especially when it's not just internal but full on embedded. We may need to wait for an iFixit or Chipworks teardown to get a better picture of how this is implemented.
  • zodiacfml - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    I'd take the Samsung with longer warranty and fat pixels... i mean, NAND. The 250GB version has more DRAM compared to the BX100 if that is any useful.

    Random read/write is what differentiates these great products.
  • zodiacfml - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    Speaking of random performance, isn't the random read results swapped with the random write chart?
  • digiguy - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Agree with Christian, the limitations of SATA 6GB hardly justify an SSD like the 850 pro or the Extreme pro (which I have), especially with PCIe virtually here (tough still rare in laptops). Something like this SSD (or the MX100 which I also have is perfectly adequate even for enthusiasts). I even wonder how many years the SATA interface will survive... I suspect that in 10 years SATA SSDs might well be a thing of the past... (especially in the 2.5 inches format...).
  • CaedenV - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    I think it depends on the use. I would imagine that SSDs are going to transition to M.2 or embedded options as the primary interface. However, I think that SATA, even SATA3, has a very long life ahead as a traditional HDD interface for bulk storage. My bet is that we will see 1-2 M.2 connectors for system drive SSDs, and continue to see 2-4 SATA connectors with RAID support for HDD installs for a very long time. They simply do not cost much, and they don't take a lot of space, so it will sort of be like how PS/2 ports keep showing up even though practically nobody uses them, or how parallel ports hung on a good 10 years after they were useful.
  • Murloc - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    kb-0133s never die, and so neither does PS/2.
  • lordken - Sunday, April 12, 2015 - link

    I do use PS/2, as long as my old M$ multimedia keyboard is going to live...no reason to buy new usb keyboard only because this one is like 10y old :)
    Also using good old mx518 (which is usb ofc)
  • Jaybus - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link

    I don't think multiple M.2 connections will be likely. A single M.2 is great for small form factors, but it takes up too much board space.
  • Pissedoffyouth - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Awesoem stuff. I have an mSata m500 and its been flawless, unlike the bad performance I've had with samsung 840's.

    Looks like this is the drive to recommend to people, I might even get myself one of the 250gb as portable drive
  • Vepsa - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    I wonder how two of these would do in RAID1 attached to a HP P410/256 controller. My poor little HP N40L could stand a capacity boost (2x250GB HDDs for booting) as well as a performance boost.
  • owbert - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Performance besides power consumption is so close to the mx100.

    Current prices have both bx100 and mx100 around the same price. Would it be a smarter buy to pick the mx100 because it offers a few gigs more storage at each tier?
  • CaedenV - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    If I were purchasing today I would spend the extra $5 for a 1TB EVO. However, the EVO isn't likely to see many more price drops over it's life span, while the BX drives are brand new and will probably see a few price drops after the initial release. 6mo from now it might be substantially cheaper than the EVO and be a true budget drive (granted sub $400 for a 1TB SSD is not a bad price at all!).

    For my next build I think I am going to stick with m.2 for the added throughput and ability to have less stuff cluttering my box (looking at ITX next time). I wonder if there will be a 'budget' M.2 drive available by then that will offer better performance than SATA3 or SATA Express options.
  • MrCommunistGen - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Due to the different controller in the 1TB 850 EVO (and the generally lower performance profile it offers compared to the 500GB model) I'd personally skip the 1TB EVO...

    Then again I'm not really in the market for a new SATA SSD at the moment either. My 500GB 840 EVO is *good enough* until I can get some future, shiny PCI-E, NVMe, 3D NAND SSD. Of course I'll need a new machine too since Z77 isn't going to know how to boot a NVMe SSD...
  • Margalus - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    the performance difference between the 500GB and the 1TB is negligible. Plus the 500GB is too small. I just bought the 1TB evo a couple weeks ago for $350. I wish they had a 2TB...
  • bunsenbunner - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Nothing like ordering two of these last night (based on other reviews thus far) for a video editing setup only to see this review drop the next day. No stress at all reading through this to verify I made the right purchase! :-)

    Samsung's handling of the 840 EVO issues had me hesitant to go with the 850 EVO (even though I know the 3D NAND in the 850 EVO is a different beast from the TLC electrical drift issues in the 840 EVO). Samsung has had some stellar drives in recent years, but they've also not had any after-the-fact issues to really deal with. A "fix" followed by a second "fix" didn't give me a lot of confidence in Samsung's ability to truly resolve the issue. And this is from a current owner of two 840 EVOs.

    I of course wanted to hold out for the Intel 750 Series, but it skews a little far on the performance vs. value per GB for my needs.
  • Elixer - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Storage Executive installs JAVA, that is why it is so huge.
    In theory, using JAVA means that this app could be ported to linux or Macs fairly easily.

    Personally, I rather not install anything that has to do with JAVA, they should have went with C# or C++ like the other OEMs are using.
  • Mr Perfect - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    Oh. Java? I've actually removed that from my systems. Nothing I have uses it, and it's got as many security flaws as Flash.

    I'm also a little disappointed that this isn't a standalone application, but then I have all of these horrible flashbacks of Internet Explorer updates hopelessly breaking browser-based applications. *IE6 flashback*
  • dave_the_nerd - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Bought one of these (500GB) the other day for a family member's build. I thought I had read a review on AT already, but I probably got it mixed up with the MX100.

    Nevertheless, I was impressed with the performance, especially for the price. (I guess I lucked out.) Seems like the arguments in favor of the BX100 come down to:

    1) Cheap
    2) Fast enough
    3) Crucial

    I'm okay with that.

    Also, I ordered a V4 once upon a time, then read some reviews of it and cancelled the order. So I guess that's twice I've lucked out.
  • jabber - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Bought one of the 250GB ones a few weeks ago.

    My review - Works just as well as any other SSD I've bought over the past two years. No disappointment.

    Erm that's about as much as you need to know.
  • stickmansam - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Any thoughts on how performance would be like if the BX100 didn't have the Samsung like OP?
  • bricko - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Been researching ssd for a bit, these seem ok, but after watching the Intel discussion of their massive new Intel 750 NVMe, PCIe 3, 1.2 Tb will make one cry, 2-4 times the speed of these old SATA stuff. Half height card for pcie slot. But massive cost, like 1100 for the 1.2 Tb, but the charts are scary. Better with new X99 mobo

    http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Intel-SSD-750...

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/9090/intel-ssd-750-p...
  • Sunburn74 - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    But no real world performance benefit for 99% of us.
  • just4U - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    I think the only real problem I have with the BX100 is ... believe it or not pricing. Here in Canada I've bought 4 of these drives but I've had to scour the net for price match deals to even come close to the MX100 which.. actually was 10-20% lower in costs. Ticks me off really.. their coming close to price parity with the older model but still not there yet.. The Sandisc Ultra2 is cheaper but it's almost always out of stock.. they tried to price this damn thing like the higher end drives. :(
  • stickmansam - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    Canada has always suffered by worse off pricing and stock issues.
  • frombauer - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    Would this be a tangible empirical upgrade over a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro?
  • Margalus - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    no, nothing you would be able to notice in usage.
  • Morawka - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    whats up with the 850 EVO scores? do you guys only have laptop drives or something? Wanted to see how it compares to a 2.5" 850 Evo, and obviously the Msata scores dont compare to it.
  • Kristian Vättö - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    I haven't had time to put the 2.5" 850 EVOs through our new SSD suite yet, but I have the scores for the mSATA/M.2 versions since we just reviewed those. The performance should essentially be the same though since the hardware is no different.
  • Nordlicht - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    It would have been nice to have BX100 being compared to Transcend SSD370. Both use the same controller. However, SSD370 uses Micron's 20nm NAND whereas BX100 uses the next generation 16nm. Performance is similar?

    On the surface the SSD370 could be more reliable due to bigger feature size. BX100 commands a small price premium, though.
  • Kristian Vättö - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link

    I plan on testing the SSD370 as soon as I have time, but the past two months have been full of travel and NDAs, thus I've only been able to test a limited number of drive with our new 2015 SSD suite.
  • leexgx - Sunday, April 12, 2015 - link

    i just got a SSD370 comming my way now, very annoying it lacks any power management

    i am happy you did the review on this as i was mostly ignoring the bx100, as the mx100 is generally cheaper then the BX100 in the UK , but for laptops well wow its worst case power useage is overall better then any other SSD (add a Devsleep supported laptop and the reg Tweek to expose the Lowest Option under balanced power profile for AHCI power management and you get mad power savinging)
    http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/177819-ahci-l...
    http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/?d=qa&f=apu_hsw_di...
  • leexgx - Sunday, April 12, 2015 - link

    be nice if they bring a update out for the SSD370 to turn back on DIPM as it must be the only current SSD in the last 2 years that lacks a 0.150w ish slumber state (most SSDs are stuck in idle 0.330w ish zone without DIPM or HIPM) even though i paid not much for this used ssd370 it be nice if it had the option
  • jaegerschnitzel - Sunday, April 12, 2015 - link

    Great review. But please can you explain me how to determine the Over-Provisioning?

    For example the drive with 500 GB. It has 8 flash chips with 512Gbit each, a total of 512GiB. User capacity is 465.76. 1 - 465,76/512. Am I right?
  • Kristian Vättö - Sunday, April 12, 2015 - link

    That is correct. The other way to put it would be 1 - (500*1000^3)/(512*1024^3).
  • jaegerschnitzel - Sunday, April 12, 2015 - link

    Thanks for your fast reply! Just another question to clarify, why not the other way round?
    1 - (512*1024^3) / (500*1000^3) = 9.95%?
  • Kristian Vättö - Sunday, April 12, 2015 - link

    That returns a negative number (-9.95%) because (512*1024^3) > (500*1000^3).

    (512*1024^3) = raw NAND capacity in bytes, i.e. 512GiB (GiB = 1024^3)

    (500*1000^3) = user capacity in bytes, i.e. 500GB = 465.76GiB (GB = 1000^3)
  • jaegerschnitzel - Sunday, April 12, 2015 - link

    That was my fault. But this should be right: (512*1024^3) / (500*1000^3) - 1 = 9.95%.

    I think you misunderstood my second question. Sorry for that, obviously my English is too bad ;-)
    Another try. Your percentage is relative to the real physical capacity (9.1%). Why do you not refer the percentage to the end user capacity (9.9%)?
  • Squuiid - Sunday, April 12, 2015 - link

    Given the problems I and many, many others have had with Crucial's MX100, I would not recommend anyone buy a Crucial SSD. Their firmware dev team are incompetent, no two ways about it. There have been serious power management problems with all of Crucial's SSD's since their C300 released years ago.
    http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/Feedback-...
  • leexgx - Sunday, April 12, 2015 - link

    the current SSDs are not even related to the C300 (witch i agree was not a great SSD as latency was not very good on that drive under some loads it was slow)
  • mczak - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link

    Note though the M500, M550 and MX100 all suffer from a very serious issue wrt queued trim (possibly related to link power management). It is imho far more serious than the 840 EVO issues as it kills your data, but much fewer people are affected by it (only these using linux and of those most won't ever see it because the kernel was patched to blacklist the feature). This problem which was known for one and a half year or so is now finally acknowledged and fixed in firmware for the M550 and MX100 (still unfixed on the M500 where it was discovered, the MX200 had it fixed from start and the BX100 doesn't support queued trim in the first place apparently and has a different controller anyway).
    That does not exactly inspire confidence - Crucial claiming "hard to reproduce" or something along these lines, because apparently both Windows and Mac OS only use non-queued variant of trim (well I don't know for sure about Mac OS because this one doesn't use trim at all by default for non-apple built ssds), but it was very easy to produce failures with linux.
    If windows were to support queued trim tomorrow you'd see return rates soar to levels never seen before... (or probably not, because if that would be enabled now surely the feature would be blacklisted for these drives too).
    Not saying queued trim is an essential feature (it's clearly not), but if Crucial wasn't willing to actually test it with the only OS which supports it they probably shouldn't have enabled it in the first place...
    I have to say though this is not really enough to steer me away from Crucial SSDs (they indeed provide very good value overall), but keep that in mind if you think Samsung are the only ones with Firmware issues.
  • FunBunny2 - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link

    Since AT went into the OCZ madness, back then, how about some investigation into this new firmware? From following the comments, it's something of a clusterfluff.
  • GregGritton - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link

    I hope that Anandtech returns to posting the log-based I/O consistency graphs.

    What you really want in the graph is an indication of how likely and severe of slowdowns you will experience, which means you want to graph the time per I/O operation (averaged over a short period like a second) rather than the number of I/O operations per second. Then, any outliers have significance. This means all of the useful information in the ops/second graphs are scrunched down at the bottom, where it is hard to see what the actual value is. (For example, the Crucial BX seems to generally have 2000 I/O ops/second, but it is hard to tell as the first line on the 1st graph is 10,000, and 5,000 on the 2nd.)

    The logarithmic graphs spread out the lower I/O ops/second values enough so that you could tell farily easily where there lower values were. Thus, they were a good compromise between a ops/second graph and a (milli/micro)seconds/op graph.
  • jamesnieves - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link

    my Aunty Isabella recently got a superb Dodge Challenger SRT8 by working part time off of a macbook air.

    workripple.com
  • Laststop311 - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link

    Well if you want to put an ssd in your laptop this is the drive to get.
  • soccerharms - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link

    The 850 EVO just dropped to 179 for the 500GB on amazon with the bx100 at 187. I will be using this in a laptop. What does everyone think?
  • CknSalad - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link

    Samsung 850 Pro 256GB is $130 on Ebay just today! Just ordered mine!
  • JackF - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link

    I was surprised that the Mushkin Reactor 1T was not in the table comparisons. It was just reviewed by Kristian back in February and received an Anandtech Recommendation. It looks to me to fin right in this performance category and they have been running the 1T versions at $339.

    After deliberating, I just upgraded to a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB (at $350). It is a noticeable upgrade from my older Crucial M4 256GB.
  • Walkeer - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link

    perhaps I am blind, but the Samsung EVO seems either more power efficient or equal compared to BX100 from the idle power consumption graph, is that correct? That invalidates the final words.
  • leexgx - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link

    The bx100 is the most power efficient ssd at this time (I have the bx100 120gb soon)

    Only interesting thing here was devsleep used or was this just slumber (dipm+hipm only)
  • SeanJ76 - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    -and Crucial has the worst reliability record when it comes to SSD's, right next to OCZ, two of the worst SSD makers today.........that's why their so dirt cheap!
  • MarkHunt - Sunday, May 3, 2015 - link

    BX100 250GB running excellent on an old SATA 2 motherboard based C2D Hackintosh, the boot speed is incredible and applications such as Logic open with little lag, which used to happen with previous HDD. TRIM is also simple to enable with Clover bootloader.
  • rogerdpack - Thursday, May 14, 2015 - link

    unfortunately it appears the 120GB version has dramatically worse write performance, just a heads up, than its counterparts: http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Crucial-BX100...
  • kadajawi - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link

    Wait a minute. According to pretty much every other reviewer, news site etc. the power loss capacitors are missing from the BX100, yet Anandtech says they are there. What is it now? To me that's a pretty big deal, as I don't run my laptop with a battery and the power plug may occasionally slide out...
  • LeonS - Monday, October 19, 2015 - link

    Has anyone found a definitive answer for this yet? I have searched high and low, but cannot find an answer!
  • sligett - Tuesday, June 16, 2015 - link

    Are the idle power consumption labels switched for the BX100 250GB and 120GB?
  • marvalsys - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link

    Just spent way too much time trying to clone a 500GB WD hard disk with Windows 10 to a BX100 to use in a new Lenovo Flex 3 15". Clone went fine (booting from a True Image 2015 CD) but with cloned SSD installed laptop wouldn't boot / wouldn't even POST or allow booting from any other drive. Same exact clone to a Samsung 850 EVO worked flawlessly. Call to Crucial tech support resulted in rep saying that they have no current SSDs compatible with Flex 3 15 (even though their website lists 7, including the BX100). Seems to be some confusion - buyers beware!

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