Crucial MX300 SSD Review

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
The crew at PC Perspective have the 3D NAND-equipped Crucial MX300 SSD in house for a little review action today. If you are looking for a large solid state drive with good overall performance at a decent price, PCPer says this could be the drive for you.

Marketed under Micron's consumer brand Crucial, the MX300 is their first entrant into the consumer space, as well as the first consumer SSD sporting IMFT 3D NAND. Crucial is known for their budget-minded SSDs, and for the MX300 they chose to go with the best cost/GB they could manage with what they had to work with. That meant putting this new 3D NAND into TLC mode. Now there are many TLC haters out there, but remember this is 3D NAND. Samsung's 850 EVO can exceed 500 MB/sec writes to TLC at its 500GB capacity point, and this MX300 is a product that is launching with *only* a 750GB capacity, so its TLC speed should be at least reasonable.
 
not bad...sad to see they never fixed the full drive speed issues. The MX200 and MX300 can't be 100% filled otherwise they glitch out.
 
Still not as good as the BX100. Sigh. That was an amazing budget drive and still is if you get a good price.
 
The performance is not hideous. According to the techreport review, It's as fast as the EVO 1TB at writes/copy operations.

This was a major hangup they had with their first TLC drive, the BX200, so it's a decent deal!

EDIT: it's faster than the BX100 at copy speeds too. You can stop pretending the old BX100 is untouchable, because it had been defeated. Just press the "Copy" button on each graph and behold.

Crucial's MX300 SSD reviewed

It's slightly slower on reads, but that doesn't matter. I dunno about you, but I'm always waiting on my SSD to write data, rather than waiting on it to read data.
 
Performance didn't change, prices went down, not bad. We're kinda in the "good enough" phase right now in terms of performance gains.

The only thing of concern for me is the use of TLC, hopefully the new process advancements make up for the loss in write endurance from the shrink and TLC combination, but I'd be more comfortable paying a bit more for an MLC solution until other consumers do the beta testing for a few years.
 
EDIT: it's faster than the BX100 at copy speeds too. You can stop pretending the old BX100 is untouchable, because it had been defeated. Just press the "Copy" button on each graph and behold.

I completely agree about MX300 being a bit faster in some respects than the BX100. That wasn't quite my point, though.

It's the price of the BX100 that made it the real winner, especially if you like power efficiency. I frequently found it on sales a bit cheaper than the Samsung 850 EVO. That happens less often now but I just picked up a 1 TB BX100 for $240 that was sitting in a sale bin. At that price it was a steal.

What I do lament is that the performance of the budget market is tanking. But fine, if that's what the market wants, they can have it. I'll wait for 2/3 TB NVMe to come out and mature a bit.
 
Going by that review it still falls short of the 850 which means that it is still the benchmark.
Damnit Crucial, why can't they just put out a drive that matches something which has been out for years?

I would like to buy a Crucial but went with the 850 due to the track record and I am pleased, it hauls.
 
The performance is not hideous. According to the techreport review, It's as fast as the EVO 1TB at writes/copy operations.

This was a major hangup they had with their first TLC drive, the BX200, so it's a decent deal!

EDIT: it's faster than the BX100 at copy speeds too. You can stop pretending the old BX100 is untouchable, because it had been defeated. Just press the "Copy" button on each graph and behold.

Crucial's MX300 SSD reviewed

It's slightly slower on reads, but that doesn't matter. I dunno about you, but I'm always waiting on my SSD to write data, rather than waiting on it to read data.


Just wait till you start copying 3GB+ files and watch it drop to 40MBps whilst the BX100 cruises on regardless in three digit speeds.

Crucial no longer make decent mainstream SSDs.
 
Just wait till you start copying 3GB+ files and watch it drop to 40MBps whilst the BX100 cruises on regardless in three digit speeds.

Crucial no longer make decent mainstream SSDs.

You know that's what they are doing, right? They're copying 10GB of large files in the first test, and 3GB of tiny files in the second test. Why would I have linked this test if the copy size was too small to saturate any dedicated cache on the MX300?

Copy speed of test 1: MX300 258MB/s, BX100: 231MB/s.

Copy speed of test 2: MX300 167MB/s, BX100: 152MB/s.

If the same 10% performance edge we see with the 3GB set is maintained with the 10GB test (consistency), then you can assert that the BX100 doesn't seem to have an advantage anymore, and the caching algorithm is not falling off at all at 10GB copy size.

While Anandtech shows the performance does go down when there's no free space to use as SLC cache, how many people are going to fill up a 750GB drive? I know I would have trouble doing so, and most people use a lot less media than I do.

And in addition to the Robocopy tests they do this heavy roughly 40GB 4k test over the course of 30 minutes, and both drives are pretty close on their write rates in the last minutes of the test:

Crucial's MX300 SSD reviewed

iometer-steady.png


Now, it's plain that this drive is a downgrade over the MX200, but ONLY IF IT'S DOING A SINGLE OPERATION. In mixed read/write, the MX200's weak controller holds it back, and the 200 and 300 are indistinguishable. Both Anandtech and Techreport agree on that.

82052.png


I do wish someone would do more thorough test at various percent full points to figure out when there is a cutoff for that SLC cache system, but I have to assume it's "very close to full."
 
Last edited:
Nice performance for a 3D VNAND SSD, Crucial. :cool:

Crap choice of TLC, Crucial. :(
 
Does it all matter in the grand scheme of things that one drive is 10% faster than another?
 
Does it all matter in the grand scheme of things that one drive is 10% faster than another?
depends. A drive can be 10% in one area but be total crap in another.

Steady state is not very good for the mx300.

I am also curious how a 950 PRO has such low steady state...they must have tested the drive and throttled the piss out of it for it to be so bad.....
 
lol at calling people TLC haters. How dare they demand quality and refuse to buy worse drives for the prices we had proper MLC products available not so long ago

On a side note I've bought 4 crucial SSD drives in the past - no way in hell I'm getting this one or BX200
 
Remember that this is 3D TLC on a larger node. I don't particularly like 2D TLC on the 1X nm node but I have no problem at all with 3D 40 nm TLC.
 
Yes I'm aware of that but that's not what they are targeting with this sentence

Now there are many TLC haters out there, but remember this is 3D NAND.

And with MX300 being priced like MLC drive but performance hitting middle ground between TLC and MLC drives there's no real point buying one when Samsung has 850 evo
 
I'm still waiting for Crucial to introduce a drive that can meet/beat the 850. They have the knowledge but just can' t seem to do it.
 
Back
Top