Agreed. That's why I appreciate seeing independent tests of manufacturers' claims. Crucial/Micron just showed me why I'll still buy Samsung over their drives. It's a shame; I used to recommend the MX100 as the best value drive. Now it's the 850 EVO all the way for value drives.
I feel the BX100 at the very least deserves consideration. The 850 Evo is not a blanket recommendation, especially for laptops where power consumption is important. The BX100 is probably the best mix of price / performance / power right now.
Then what you really want to look at is energy use for a given IO task. Consider the 512GB EVO and BX: EVO: ~350MB/s @ 1.6W. = 218.75 MB/J = BX100: 300MB/s @ 1.4W = 200 MB/J
For a given task the EVO will finish faster and do it with less total energy use.
Considering the price of the M500's (960GB model <$300) I still use those almost exclusively unless the MX\BX100's happen to be cheaper. Been very happy with Crucial drives since the C300, very few issues and decent performance for the price. Support is now excellent with their "storage executive" software making firmware updates relatively painless.
Given the fact that most workloads won't cause noticable differences between high end and low end drives, the price, and the power loss protection mean that the ancient m500 is probably a better choice both featurewise and pricewise than its newer, faster competitors for most PCs.
Don't like the idea of DWA drives twice the amount of writes and silly more power draw (the bx100 is a good way on power just lacks FDE witch is unfortunate) mx200 is not on my list of drives to get
Are the flash chips and controller it uses still available? If either has been discontinued they wouldn't have a choice. Even if the flash was available, but just significantly more expensive; keeping a competitive price would likely force their hand.
Take another look at Anandtech Bench. At the 500GB capacity, the mx100 beats the m550 by a small amount across the board. Dropping down to the 250GB capacity affects the write speed of the mx100 more than the write speed of the m550, so the m550 outperforms the mx100 on some benchmarks, but not by a lot. The bottom line is that the m550 and mx100 are close enough in performance that I doubt you would notice any difference in real life usage.
I wish I know the answer to that question. I use plenty of M500 and M500, and I really miss them. I don't know if SanDisk could be decent alternative to M550, I don't know how additional features compare to each other (power loss, power management, etc etc). Is there any comprehensive comparison between Micron and SanDisk ??
Yikes, not at all impressed with the DWA in the benchmark workloads! It seems like DWA is a highly dubious feature for a price mark-up over the BX series. At the right price point the larger capacity MX200 w/o DWA (500 and 1TB) still seem like excellent buys, they're just competing super-hard with their BX brethren.
Thanks for the good review, Kristian. I liked the call-out on the continued lack of full power-loss protection, and I really liked the constructive criticism in your final words.
I'm sure the cache does *something* - mostly when you don't write large amounts of data for minutes on end.
The problem with MX200 256GB's implementation is that Crucial is using too much of pseudo-SLC (all the space there is) and the drive ends up driving itself against the wall when the drive fills up. The drive still needs to keep up with the continuing drive writes and at the same time move existing data from SLC to MLC.
SSD market has becoming just as boring as CPU. Time for new chipste and NVMe drives which will finally deliver an actual improvement. However for clients, it doesn't really matter...even my intel G2 was good enough.
I continue to be happy with my 1TB Samsung EVO drive. For $359, it is/was a good value, and consistently performs high on these comparison charts.
Just out of curiosity, why is the Mushkin Reactor not included on any of the comparison charts? When I was considering an upgrade, it was at the top of my list, but you never include it in the comparison charts. You gave it a Anandtech recommendation back in February?
Sounds like what Kingston did with the SSDNow series, older SSDNow drives were fast but the newer ones are ridiculously slow, so now the same with Crucial?
The Kingston SSDs are great value as they are usually the cheapest SSDs on Amazon etc. And in most cases are probably being used to upgrade SATA II equipped hardware. In which case they will push 260MBps all day long. Seen many labour for days over SSD specs and reviews when in fact the machine they want to upgrade doesn't have SATA III.
In the SSD market I only see excitement in PCIe/NVMe designs. I believe there is a place for SATA drives, but the differentiation needs to innovative; i.e. beyond performance. Warranty, reliability, consistency, software tools, and RAID support are areas for differentiation.
After looking at the value & mainstream performance products in the chart the Samsung Evo is a compelling product. Crucial's BX line is a price undercutting product compared to the Evo and it doesn't do that. I say this because the BX feature set is sub-par to the Evo. The MX is the Evo's direct competitor.
I do not get TRIM validation. There was never doubt that TRIM works in the sense that they LBAs contain zeroes. The question always was whether TRIMming a drive would restore degraded performance. And for some drives, it would not. Why isn't this verified any more? Or have I missed something?
Where does the key come from? Can I set my own key?
The reason I ask is, if all the drives have the same key from the manufacturer then it is like there is no key at all. As if you know one key you know them all.
If it is made by a random number generator, how do we not know there is a pattern from the generator so a hacker only needs to do a few thousand (million?) tests to break the encryption?
If on the other-hand we can set the key, is it easy to do? Is the key such that we can write it to the drive but it is hard to read out?
Wow I just purchased the MX200 250GB a couple of days ago. If I had read this article before, I wouldn't have bought it. btw, thanks for this great article, AT :)
Lol, same for me here. Should have gotten a BX100. The MX200 performs without problems though, so no point returning it, just it's not the best value for money.
No comments on the NAND being 16nm? Is this not an issue? I am reluctant to buy MX100, 200 and BX100 when there is M500 still in stock (the price seems to be rising).
Another review request : Intel`s new SSD 535 (this seems to use hynix 16nm NAND memory).
No, it's not an issue. Even with "just" the guaranteed endurance it's going to last a long time. And very probably a lot longer, as in any SSD which is not under continous sustained use (which would cause very high write amplification).
"Another thing I'm not very satisfied with is the Dynamic Write Acceleration. I don't think an SLC cache is very useful in an MLC based drive because the performance benefits are marginal, at least with SATA 6Gbps."
Sandisk showed with the Ultra II that SLC caching doesn't have to mean terrible latency if implemented correctly.
As a cheap drive, the ARC 100 is looking better every day. For typical desktop workloads, it 'feels' the fastest thanks to it's low latency. I don't understand why it's not recommended more often.
I looks like Crucial should really tune their algorithm. Very short bursty writes, which still fit into the DRAM cache, can easily be written in MLC mode. There's enough time for time. Longer bursts could / should be written as SLC, if enough drive space is available. Otherwise MLC mode would be better, if it's likely the data would have to be reorganized soon anyway. Which also happens under long sustained writes, where there's a point where the drive should switch from SLC to MLC mode.
Well, going back to when SSD's were becoming all the rage and OCZ was having all their problems with their controllers, etc.... Crucial was one of the most consistently reliable and dependable SSD's in the market....... I have consistently used my 4 m4 series 128 GB SSD's for nearly 5 years without not 1 single problem, and have used (2) m550's or several years with no problems........reliability is what makes me keep returning to a certain vendor,, be it motherboard, memory, videocard, HDD, etc....
so far my MX200 250 GB SSD is working just as great as my old C300 or m4's are doing.... lets hope that this MX200 lasts at least 3 to 4 years with no problems.... something I can not say for SSD's made by OCZ, Intel, Samsung, or HD's like Western digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Maxtor.......... ( am hoping that Western Digital HD's get better now that they bought out Hitachi........ I have over 18 hitachi Hard Drives ranging from 14 yrs old to 2 yrs old, and have yet to have one brick on me, like most every other brand has...... ) regarding TRIM and SSD degrading performance.......... after 5 years +/- continuous use of my Crucial m4 series SSD's ...... running test via AIDA64 Extreme Edition software, I am still running around 98.7 + % performance level, hopefully this MX200 will run just as good....
I'm glad my 2 X Crucial M4 128GB in RAID0 are *STILL* king in 99.999% of my desktop scenarios. over 3 1/2 years now, and not as single issue. Still pumping ~900MB/s in sequential read, even at 75% full! Diskinfo reports them at 97% good. At this rate, they will last me well over 50 years before reaching 50% degradation!
It's good to see AT posting critical reviews (where deserved) again.
It's also good to see innovative thinking again, such as the call for the industry to benchmark SSDs at lower queue depths. I would like to read more on the low queue depth issues and which client machines / users are able to push above 1 or 2 QD (if any) and under what circumstances.
It would be nice if either crucial or samsung would make larger ssd's in a 2.5 inch form factor. a 1.5tb or 2tb ssd gives me an all ssd system while a 1tb ssd gives me the need for a second drive. Instead of the little tweaks here and there. Like this one (MX200) which seems to me a fail gives us the size increase. How many years since the first 1tb ssd from crucial (listed 960gb)
Thank you for yet another great SSD review. I am from the old-skool camp when eeking out performance from drives meant the only alternative was SCSI drives spinning at 10k RPM and when SCSI cables cost more than the current 128GB SSDs. I gradually stepped up to VelociRaptor HDDs that were the only performance champs leaving behind SCSI HDDs and waiting for SSDs to get to affordable range. Yet those VelociRaptors are refusing to die in my system after all these years. A few years ago, I finally broke down and bought a Patriot Pyro 240GB as my current Win8.1Pro OS boot drive (all user data are directed to the older VelociRaptors to afford longevity to the Patriot Pyro). I use a utility called SSDLifePro (http://ssd-life.com) to periodically monitor the performance of my Patriot Pyro. It currently tells me the following info: READs = 27TB >> WRITEs = 15TB Energized Time = 23,635Hours (2yrs, 8mos,14days) Power Cycles = 609 times Estimated Lifetime = 6yrs, 11mos >> End Of Life = April 2022
No, the above info is not for neener-neener, but strictly as a pre-amble to the following question: Why are Patriot (Ignite series) SSDs never discussed (or reviewed) in AnandTech? Ditto for Intel SSDs??
Can You retest MX200 250GB with new firmware MU02?
MU02 Crucial MX200 SSD (all form factors) Release Date: 07/14/2015 Improved Read Performance on small address spans Improved Random Write performance on transfers not aligned to 4KB address boundaries Improved Acceleration Capacity Recovery after TRIM and SANITIZE commands Added Informative SMART thresholds for Attributes 202 and 5 Added Support for READ DMA BUFFER, WRITE DMA BUFFER, and DOWNLOAD MICROCODE DMA Commands Bug Fixes and Stability Improvements
I just purchased a Crucial MX200 500GB for my Dell M3800 laptop (Ubuntu edition). I need drive encryption for work. Have only been using it for a day so far, but am loving it. I'm not that fussed about performance issues between different SSD drives, all I know is this SSD is so much faster than the spin drive that came with the M3800. It feels like a new machine.
Thanks for the review. Very informative. I'll check out the 850 EVO for my personal laptop.
Please show us actual capacity on storage device reviews! These things vary too much from manufacturer to manufacturer, a drive labeled 480gb is often easily over 20gb smaller than one labeled 512gb in true capacity.
I've been using Crucials 960GB and few OCZs since their early appearance. 24/7 for 3-4 years, all drives work well, health 100% according OCZ and Crucial health tools.
(Funny that OCZ Limited Eddition 100GB still works surviving decent load being bought in 2010... after reading Anand's review about SF-1500 inside).
The only alternative I considered was SanDisk Extreme, but I like Enterprise features in Crucial: pseudo-SLC, Power Loss Protection, Redundant Array of Independent NAND, 256-bit encryption. The "Adaptive Thermal Protection" (shutting down unused storage components) allows me to use them 24/7... I wish I know if other drives have these features...
I think a life expectancy is up to 320TBW, while Samsung 850 Pro is maxed out at 150TBW, so maybe performance isn't the best, but I would keep on going with Crucial because I never lost a drive.
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busky2k - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Thanks for the honest review. Its a shame the MX200 doesn't excel like its brethren.romrunning - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Agreed. That's why I appreciate seeing independent tests of manufacturers' claims. Crucial/Micron just showed me why I'll still buy Samsung over their drives. It's a shame; I used to recommend the MX100 as the best value drive. Now it's the 850 EVO all the way for value drives.sabot00 - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
I feel the BX100 at the very least deserves consideration. The 850 Evo is not a blanket recommendation, especially for laptops where power consumption is important. The BX100 is probably the best mix of price / performance / power right now.Stoatie - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link
Then what you really want to look at is energy use for a given IO task. Consider the 512GB EVO and BX:EVO: ~350MB/s @ 1.6W. = 218.75 MB/J =
BX100: 300MB/s @ 1.4W = 200 MB/J
For a given task the EVO will finish faster and do it with less total energy use.
leexgx - Tuesday, May 24, 2016 - link
but overall BX100 uses less power (i norm aim to buy BX100 for laptops unless SED drive is required then its norm intel 1000 or 2000 drive)Samus - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Considering the price of the M500's (960GB model <$300) I still use those almost exclusively unless the MX\BX100's happen to be cheaper. Been very happy with Crucial drives since the C300, very few issues and decent performance for the price. Support is now excellent with their "storage executive" software making firmware updates relatively painless.emn13 - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Given the fact that most workloads won't cause noticable differences between high end and low end drives, the price, and the power loss protection mean that the ancient m500 is probably a better choice both featurewise and pricewise than its newer, faster competitors for most PCs.leexgx - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
Don't like the idea of DWA drives twice the amount of writes and silly more power draw (the bx100 is a good way on power just lacks FDE witch is unfortunate) mx200 is not on my list of drives to getedlee - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
i am not sure why crucial stopped producing m550, it performs better than mx100 and mx200 series, and was true successor to the legendary m4 driveDanNeely - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Are the flash chips and controller it uses still available? If either has been discontinued they wouldn't have a choice. Even if the flash was available, but just significantly more expensive; keeping a competitive price would likely force their hand.KAlmquist - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
Take another look at Anandtech Bench. At the 500GB capacity, the mx100 beats the m550 by a small amount across the board. Dropping down to the 250GB capacity affects the write speed of the mx100 more than the write speed of the m550, so the m550 outperforms the mx100 on some benchmarks, but not by a lot. The bottom line is that the m550 and mx100 are close enough in performance that I doubt you would notice any difference in real life usage.petar_b - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
I wish I know the answer to that question. I use plenty of M500 and M500, and I really miss them. I don't know if SanDisk could be decent alternative to M550, I don't know how additional features compare to each other (power loss, power management, etc etc). Is there any comprehensive comparison between Micron and SanDisk ??Devo2007 - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Small typo on page 3. Under the Destroyer (Data Rate) graph, it says the following:Despite the improved IO consistency, the MX200 doesn't have any advantage over the MX200 in our heaviest The Destroyer trace."
I'm not sure if you meant MX100 or BX100 the second time
XZerg - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
same on the page 10 under the power consumption chart:but at ~60mW the MX200 enjoys a small benefit over the MX200
Ryan Smith - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Thanks. Fixed.Essence_of_War - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Yikes, not at all impressed with the DWA in the benchmark workloads! It seems like DWA is a highly dubious feature for a price mark-up over the BX series. At the right price point the larger capacity MX200 w/o DWA (500 and 1TB) still seem like excellent buys, they're just competing super-hard with their BX brethren.olafgarten - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
I'm still waiting to see what SanDisk does this year.romrunning - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Thanks for the good review, Kristian. I liked the call-out on the continued lack of full power-loss protection, and I really liked the constructive criticism in your final words.Shadowmaster625 - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
why would they even release a product with an slc cache when the slc cache clearly does absolutely nothing?hulu - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
I'm sure the cache does *something* - mostly when you don't write large amounts of data for minutes on end.The problem with MX200 256GB's implementation is that Crucial is using too much of pseudo-SLC (all the space there is) and the drive ends up driving itself against the wall when the drive fills up. The drive still needs to keep up with the continuing drive writes and at the same time move existing data from SLC to MLC.
beginner99 - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
SSD market has becoming just as boring as CPU. Time for new chipste and NVMe drives which will finally deliver an actual improvement. However for clients, it doesn't really matter...even my intel G2 was good enough.JackF - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
I continue to be happy with my 1TB Samsung EVO drive. For $359, it is/was a good value, and consistently performs high on these comparison charts.Just out of curiosity, why is the Mushkin Reactor not included on any of the comparison charts? When I was considering an upgrade, it was at the top of my list, but you never include it in the comparison charts. You gave it a Anandtech recommendation back in February?
Teknobug - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Sounds like what Kingston did with the SSDNow series, older SSDNow drives were fast but the newer ones are ridiculously slow, so now the same with Crucial?MrSpadge - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
Take another look at the BX100 - that's a really good value drive and anything but slow.jabber - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
The Kingston SSDs are great value as they are usually the cheapest SSDs on Amazon etc. And in most cases are probably being used to upgrade SATA II equipped hardware. In which case they will push 260MBps all day long. Seen many labour for days over SSD specs and reviews when in fact the machine they want to upgrade doesn't have SATA III.der - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Crucial for CRUCIAL performance. Eek!eanazag - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
In the SSD market I only see excitement in PCIe/NVMe designs. I believe there is a place for SATA drives, but the differentiation needs to innovative; i.e. beyond performance. Warranty, reliability, consistency, software tools, and RAID support are areas for differentiation.After looking at the value & mainstream performance products in the chart the Samsung Evo is a compelling product. Crucial's BX line is a price undercutting product compared to the Evo and it doesn't do that. I say this because the BX feature set is sub-par to the Evo. The MX is the Evo's direct competitor.
KaarlisK - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
I do not get TRIM validation. There was never doubt that TRIM works in the sense that they LBAs contain zeroes. The question always was whether TRIMming a drive would restore degraded performance. And for some drives, it would not.Why isn't this verified any more? Or have I missed something?
creed3020 - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Thanks so much for the review Kristian. Now I can finally compare this in Bench to others drives when making recommendations for clients.zodiacfml - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Price and warranty. Anyway, it is just getting more difficult to compete with Samsung which is the case and it will just get worse.KAlmquist - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
I'm hoping that once other companies get 3D NAND into production we will see some interesting competition for Samsung.austinsguitar - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
I love how they post this but not the mx100 tests.... whats the FKING POINT in testing than?Ryan Smith - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
I'm not sure I follow. The MX100 is in our graphs.earl colby pottinger - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Question about the hardware encryption.Where does the key come from? Can I set my own key?
The reason I ask is, if all the drives have the same key from the manufacturer then it is like there is no key at all. As if you know one key you know them all.
If it is made by a random number generator, how do we not know there is a pattern from the generator so a hacker only needs to do a few thousand (million?) tests to break the encryption?
If on the other-hand we can set the key, is it easy to do? Is the key such that we can write it to the drive but it is hard to read out?
Vinchent - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Wow I just purchased the MX200 250GB a couple of days ago.If I had read this article before, I wouldn't have bought it.
btw, thanks for this great article, AT :)
RandUser - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
Lol, same for me here. Should have gotten a BX100. The MX200 performs without problems though, so no point returning it, just it's not the best value for money.MrSpadge - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
If you don't fill it in a sudden rush, it's still a fine drive. Not the best choice, but not terrible either.PaulBags - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
The Samsung 850 pro 1tb is missing from most charts, disappointing.Sejong - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
No comments on the NAND being 16nm? Is this not an issue? I am reluctant to buy MX100, 200 and BX100 when there is M500 still in stock (the price seems to be rising).Another review request : Intel`s new SSD 535 (this seems to use hynix 16nm NAND memory).
MrSpadge - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
No, it's not an issue. Even with "just" the guaranteed endurance it's going to last a long time. And very probably a lot longer, as in any SSD which is not under continous sustained use (which would cause very high write amplification).jonovw - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
When I got mine, the MX200 was pretty reasonably priced compared to it's competition for a M.2 SATA drive.MrMilli - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
"Another thing I'm not very satisfied with is the Dynamic Write Acceleration. I don't think an SLC cache is very useful in an MLC based drive because the performance benefits are marginal, at least with SATA 6Gbps."Sandisk showed with the Ultra II that SLC caching doesn't have to mean terrible latency if implemented correctly.
As a cheap drive, the ARC 100 is looking better every day. For typical desktop workloads, it 'feels' the fastest thanks to it's low latency. I don't understand why it's not recommended more often.
MrSpadge - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
I looks like Crucial should really tune their algorithm. Very short bursty writes, which still fit into the DRAM cache, can easily be written in MLC mode. There's enough time for time. Longer bursts could / should be written as SLC, if enough drive space is available. Otherwise MLC mode would be better, if it's likely the data would have to be reorganized soon anyway. Which also happens under long sustained writes, where there's a point where the drive should switch from SLC to MLC mode.Johnny Five - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
Well, going back to when SSD's were becoming all the rage and OCZ was having all their problems with their controllers, etc.... Crucial was one of the most consistently reliable and dependable SSD's in the market....... I have consistently used my 4 m4 series 128 GB SSD's for nearly 5 years without not 1 single problem, and have used (2) m550's or several years with no problems........reliability is what makes me keep returning to a certain vendor,, be it motherboard, memory, videocard, HDD, etc....so far my MX200 250 GB SSD is working just as great as my old C300 or m4's are doing.... lets hope that this MX200 lasts at least 3 to 4 years with no problems.... something I can not say for SSD's made by OCZ, Intel, Samsung, or HD's like Western digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Maxtor.......... ( am hoping that Western Digital HD's get better now that they bought out Hitachi........ I have over 18 hitachi Hard Drives ranging from 14 yrs old to 2 yrs old, and have yet to have one brick on me, like most every other brand has...... )
regarding TRIM and SSD degrading performance.......... after 5 years +/- continuous use of my Crucial m4 series SSD's ...... running test via AIDA64 Extreme Edition software, I am still running around 98.7 + % performance level, hopefully this MX200 will run just as good....
Impulses - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
Crucial's had it's rash of firmware issues like anybody else...fokka - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
i didn't expect the bx100 to stay that competitive, i guess it's the drive to get right now, especially in a mobile setup where power draw matters.Harry Lloyd - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
I want a 512 GB drive with MX100/200 performance for about 100 $. Possible next year (3D NAND or something)?Ramon Zarat - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
I'm glad my 2 X Crucial M4 128GB in RAID0 are *STILL* king in 99.999% of my desktop scenarios. over 3 1/2 years now, and not as single issue. Still pumping ~900MB/s in sequential read, even at 75% full! Diskinfo reports them at 97% good. At this rate, they will last me well over 50 years before reaching 50% degradation!hrrmph - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
It's good to see AT posting critical reviews (where deserved) again.It's also good to see innovative thinking again, such as the call for the industry to benchmark SSDs at lower queue depths. I would like to read more on the low queue depth issues and which client machines / users are able to push above 1 or 2 QD (if any) and under what circumstances.
philipma1957 - Sunday, May 24, 2015 - link
It would be nice if either crucial or samsung would make larger ssd's in a 2.5 inch form factor.a 1.5tb or 2tb ssd gives me an all ssd system while a 1tb ssd gives me the need for a second drive.
Instead of the little tweaks here and there. Like this one (MX200) which seems to me a fail gives us the size increase. How many years since the first 1tb ssd from crucial (listed 960gb)
RAMdiskSeeker - Sunday, May 24, 2015 - link
Would you be able to re-run and publish the benchmarks for the MX200 250GB drive formatted as a 100GB drive so that it runs entirely in SLC mode?jihe - Monday, May 25, 2015 - link
No way would I recommend Samsung to anyone. Selling TLC for the price of MLC? Massive lost of performance?pseudoid - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
Thank you for yet another great SSD review.I am from the old-skool camp when eeking out performance from drives meant the only alternative was SCSI drives spinning at 10k RPM and when SCSI cables cost more than the current 128GB SSDs. I gradually stepped up to VelociRaptor HDDs that were the only performance champs leaving behind SCSI HDDs and waiting for SSDs to get to affordable range. Yet those VelociRaptors are refusing to die in my system after all these years.
A few years ago, I finally broke down and bought a Patriot Pyro 240GB as my current Win8.1Pro OS boot drive (all user data are directed to the older VelociRaptors to afford longevity to the Patriot Pyro).
I use a utility called SSDLifePro (http://ssd-life.com) to periodically monitor the performance of my Patriot Pyro. It currently tells me the following info:
READs = 27TB >> WRITEs = 15TB
Energized Time = 23,635Hours (2yrs, 8mos,14days)
Power Cycles = 609 times
Estimated Lifetime = 6yrs, 11mos >> End Of Life = April 2022
No, the above info is not for neener-neener, but strictly as a pre-amble to the following question:
Why are Patriot (Ignite series) SSDs never discussed (or reviewed) in AnandTech?
Ditto for Intel SSDs??
NvidiaWins - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
Crucial made the list of failing SSD's drives last week-read- http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-st...
NvidiaWins - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
Smart people buy Intel, Intel SSD's don't fail, ever.You see that Intel is considered the only reliable SSD manufacturer-
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-st...
Arkadius - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Can You retest MX200 250GB with new firmware MU02?MU02 Crucial MX200 SSD (all form factors)
Release Date: 07/14/2015
Improved Read Performance on small address spans
Improved Random Write performance on transfers not aligned to 4KB address boundaries
Improved Acceleration Capacity Recovery after TRIM and SANITIZE commands
Added Informative SMART thresholds for Attributes 202 and 5
Added Support for READ DMA BUFFER, WRITE DMA BUFFER, and DOWNLOAD MICROCODE DMA Commands
Bug Fixes and Stability Improvements
http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/support-ssd-firmware
Resental - Sunday, December 27, 2015 - link
Quote, I just bought a MX200 250GB, I have obtained much better results then those in this article, maybe they solved with latest firmware.Scott.deagan - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
I just purchased a Crucial MX200 500GB for my Dell M3800 laptop (Ubuntu edition). I need drive encryption for work. Have only been using it for a day so far, but am loving it. I'm not that fussed about performance issues between different SSD drives, all I know is this SSD is so much faster than the spin drive that came with the M3800. It feels like a new machine.Thanks for the review. Very informative. I'll check out the 850 EVO for my personal laptop.
drSeehas - Saturday, October 17, 2015 - link
"DRAM (DDR3-1600) 512 MB" for the 250 GB drive. Are you sure?Firedrops - Saturday, February 13, 2016 - link
Please show us actual capacity on storage device reviews! These things vary too much from manufacturer to manufacturer, a drive labeled 480gb is often easily over 20gb smaller than one labeled 512gb in true capacity.yolomolo - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Can i get some advice from you PRO, should i better go get mSata : Samsung EVO 850 or CRUCIAL MX200 ?petar_b - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
I've been using Crucials 960GB and few OCZs since their early appearance. 24/7 for 3-4 years, all drives work well, health 100% according OCZ and Crucial health tools.(Funny that OCZ Limited Eddition 100GB still works surviving decent load being bought in 2010... after reading Anand's review about SF-1500 inside).
The only alternative I considered was SanDisk Extreme, but I like Enterprise features in Crucial: pseudo-SLC, Power Loss Protection, Redundant Array of Independent NAND, 256-bit encryption. The "Adaptive Thermal Protection" (shutting down unused storage components) allows me to use them 24/7... I wish I know if other drives have these features...
I think a life expectancy is up to 320TBW, while Samsung 850 Pro is maxed out at 150TBW, so maybe performance isn't the best, but I would keep on going with Crucial because I never lost a drive.