Storage

Crucial BX200 Review

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November 3, 2015 7 Min Read
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Destined to supersede the BX100, BX200 is Micron’s first TLC-based solid state drive using the SM2256 Controller. Looking for an affordable SSD? This is it!



Product on Review: BX200 Solid State Drive
Manufacturer & Sponsor: Crucial
Street Price: £220 GBP / $299 USD

Crucial has been the go-to brand for consumers needing an affordable route to solid-state storage. Their drives have, in the past offered good all round performance – Crucial’s MX series set a new standard in the sector a few years back by offering the ideal balance between cost and performance. Today Crucial are back with a new SSD which seeks to further accentuate this formula.

In the spotlight today is the new BX200. This drive supersedes the BX100 and is Micron’s first TLC-based solid state solution. The BX200 is available in three different capacities – 240GB, 480GB and 960GB. The usual benefits from a SATA SSD continue by offering superior transfer rates to a mechanical drive, better efficiency and stronger reliability; the main difference is going to be the extremely aggressive pricing which sees the largest capacity option (960GB) arrive with street price of just £220 GBP – $299 USD!


Crucial on their BX200
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Packaging, Bundle & Closer Look



BX200 arrives in a small packet which resembles previous releases from Crucial. The packaging is professional and features a depiction of the drive on the front, while on the reverse there is a list of contents and information surrounding the included standards.


Opening this box up we have a number of included items which form the bundle. These accessories include:

• BX200 SSD inside an anti-static bag
• 7mm to 9.5mm spacer
• Data migration software key (Acronis True Image HD)

Some drives lack a spacer kit but it’s nice to see Crucial including this. The inclusion of Acronis True Image HD is also very useful since we have access to backup software as soon as the drive is installed.



In keeping with the BX/MX counterparts, BX200 utilises a part plastic, part metal shroud and a branding label on the front to distinguish the model name/number. The reverse contains serial number details which will be useful should you need to get in contact with Crucial for any technical assistance.

BX200 replaces BX100 in Crucial’s lineup and is Micron’s first TLC-based SSD – so far SanDisk and Samsung have dominated the TLC arena due to controller support. At the very heart of this drive is the Silicon Motion SM2256 Controller. SM2256 was announced this summer and to our knowledge has only been used in one other vendor’s solid state release.

This controller supports up to 524MB/s Sequential Read and 400MB/s Sequential Write. The IOPS performance entertains up to 90K (4KB Random Read) and up to 70K (4K Random Write). AES-56 and TCG Opal 2.0 encryption methodologies are supported.

Crucial actually claim slightly higher than these specifications for the Sequential Performance – on the following pages we’ll discover how this holds up.

Test Setup & Methodology


Our test system is formatted and a fresh version of Windows is installed with just drives in place – no additional applications. Windows is then updated to the latest release and the drivers are installed. Included in the list of benchmarks are the following applications:

Benchmarks
Anvil Pro
AS SSD
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46
Futuremark PCMark 8

Test system



CPU Intel Core-i7 5960X
Motherboard MSI X99S – SLI
Graphics PALIT NVIDIA GTX 760
Memory 16GB Corsair Vengeance Pro (2666MHz) CL15
HDD

– Crucial BX200 960GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– OCZ Vector 180 240GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Crucial MX200 1TB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Kingston HyperX Savage 256GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Corsair Force LX 256GB (Sata 6Gbps)
– Plextor M6e 256GB(PCIe)

PSU Corsair HX1050 Gold
OS Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit

Benchmarks: Anvil Pro

Anvil Pro from Anvil Storage utilities is one of the most popular storage benchmarking utilities today thanks to the large suit of tests available. You can test pretty much anything from Read/write Speed to IOPs with many variables to tweak allowing you to get either a single or host of results to compare with other likeminded enthusiasts. In our test we ran the standard suite 5 times, subtracting both the highest and lowest scores and determined the final result from the average of the remaining three results.



Benchmarks: AS SSD

AS SSD Benchmark is a straightforward tool for measuring the speed of your SSD drive.

Simply launch the program, choose your drive, click Start, and it’ll test your SSD’s read and write speed in a variety of ways, delivering a score for each when it’s done. And if that’s not enough, there are also additional file copy and compression-related benchmarks available from the Tools menu. (The author’s support page is German only, but if you need further English explanations then there’s a thread on the program at the OCZ Technology forum.).



Benchmarks: ATTO

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.



Benchmarks: PCMark 8

We use the Futuremark PCMark 8 utility to measure storage via Photoshop performance under both light and heavy loading conditions. Accelerated (open CL) is used to perform this test. The test is measured in seconds to complete.



Conclusion


As we’ve already mentioned in this review the BX200 is one of the first solid states to utilise the newly released Silicon Motion SM2256 Controller. This is also the first time Micron have used made use of a TLC-based solution.

Throughout our testing of BX200 we discovered that this drive is able to maintain good overall performance in a range of different scenarios. Sequential read and write performance simulate access patterns which are synonymous with the transfer of large multimedia files – video, music, images. BX200 handled these tests very well and retained consistent results.


Along with the drive comes SLC Write Acceleration, TRIM support and the inclusion of Acronis True Image HD. These features reinforce that Crucial’s new drive has the additional options that enthusiasts are wanting.

As with other SSDs, there are clear benefits over using a conventional mechanical hard drive. BX200 adopts fast transfer rates, operates efficiently and is a robust storage solution – by now, consumers should be well-aware of these advantages. Where BX200 really stands out, is on the cost. This 960GB version arrives with a street price of just £220 GBP – $299 USD; significantly cheaper than other drives of the same capacity.

Crucial’s BX200 sets out to bring a new level of affordability to the SSD market. This new drive is quite simply one of the best value storage solutions out there. If you’re still using mechanical drives, this is the perfect excuse to finally put them into retirement.

Pros
+ Consistently good performance
+ Great value
+ TRIM Support
+ Comes with Acronis True Image HD
+ SLC Write Acceleration
+ 3 Years Warranty

Cons
– There are none!

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