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New test: Crucial BX300 SSD



The BX300 is Crucial’s newest 2.5-inch SSD consumer drive based on 3D-NAND technology. The new BX300 SSD is the direct successor to the BX200 and is equipped with a Silicon Motion controller and special firmware. The high-performance BX300 technology is available in 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB.

Over the past few years, Crucial has released quite a few budget drives, and this new product is no exception. In spite of this, the BX300 demonstrates quite impressive performance and energy efficiency indicators compared to solid-state drives, in some cases 10 times ahead of the latter. This drive would not be called a novelty if it did not differ from its predecessor BX200 (2015 release). The sequential read speed is 555 MB / s and the write is 510 MB / s (the BX200 had 535 MB / s and 450 MB / s), and the IOPS value is 95,000 with random read and 90,000 with random write (BX200 - 66,000 IOPS and 78,000 IOPS, respectively).
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To simplify the upgrade for users, there is Crucial's Advisor, a tool that determines whether a user's PC is compatible with Crucial drives. There is also a Acronis True Image HD software key for smoothly migrating data from the old disk to the BX300.

Key features of the BX300:


Design and build

The appearance of the BX300 is no different from the predecessors of the BX100 and BX200, with the exception, of course, of inscriptions with information (product brand, form factor). The body is made of durable metal with smoothed corners.

The back side of the SDD has a regular white sticker, which displays information about a particular drive model, capacity and form factor.

On each side of the drive there are two mounting holes. And given the form factor (only 2.5 inches), the BX300 can fit into almost any laptop. For stationary PCs, the manufacturer provides together with an SSD adapter from 7 mm to 9.5 mm.

Synthetic benchmarks (performance tests)

All the tests, the results of which you will see below, were performed on the StorageReview HP Z640 workstation. For comparison and as rivals for the BX300, the following drives were chosen:


IOMeter serial transfer 2MB (read / write)



As you can see, the Crucial BX300 480GB came very close to the leadership position on the “Reading” indicator with the indicator of 506.66MB / s, second only to ADATA SU900 (521.55MB / s). When recording, the drive issued 460.86MB / s, finishing in fourth place.

IOMeter random transfer 2 MB (read / write)



But with random transfer, the BX300 480GB readings (432.21MB / s read and 461.73MB / s write) placed it almost at the bottom of the list, only ADATA SU900 512GB was worse.

IOMeter 4K random transfer (read / write)



In this test, the reading performance was 30.24MB / s (at the end of the list), the record - 107.21MB / s (in the middle).

IOMeter random 4K (read / write) / IOPS transfer

In the IOPS category, the BX300 was able to squeeze 7740.82 IOPS for reading and 27445.66 IOPS for writing, taking the last step. The leader, not surprisingly, was the Samsung 850 Pro 2TB.

IOMeter 4K write latency



In this test, we considered for comparison with other drives, both the average and maximum latency.

IOMeter at 100% reading 4K



In this test, with a random workload with 100% read activity and scaling from 1 to 64 QD. The BX300 showed the best result (1000 IOPS better than the Samsung 850 Pro 1TB itself) - from 27441.61 IOPS and up to 85296.65 IOPS.

IOMeter with 100% 4K recording



In this benchmark, the BX300 480GB index ranged from 7804.250197 IOPS to 96519.20322 IOPS. Second place, right behind the Samsung 850 Pro.

In the final series of synthetic tests, we will compare SSD drives in a server environment of mixed workload with a queue depth of 1 to 128. Each of our test server profiles has a strong bias towards reading activity, starting with 67% of the database profile reading and ending with 100% read the web server profile.

IOMeter DB (IOPS)



The first is the database profile, with 67% of the read and 33% of the record, mostly focused on the 8K transfer. And here the BX300 demonstrated a range of 7,438.52-47,704.30 IOPS.

IOMeter Web Server (IOPS)



Our web server profile is read-only with a spread of transfer volumes from 512 bytes to 512 KB. In this workload, the BX300 provided a range from 4598.5 IOPS to 23 988.22 IOPS.

IOMeter File Server (IOPS)



The next profile is 80% read and 20% write, the size of the transferred files is from 512 bytes to 64 KB. The BX300 issued 5,240.36 IOPS and 36,908.54 IOPS, again reaching the top of the leaders.

IOMeter Workstation (IOPS)



The latter profile focuses on workstation activity with 20% write and 80% read when transferring 8K files. The start of our test was not very good - only 5180.51 IOPS, but in the end he became the leader with 48330.04 IOPS.

Tests in real conditions

Synthetic tests certainly help to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a particular drive, but do not provide a complete understanding of how they will work in real life. Therefore, we decided to test the BX300 using StorageMark 2010 in three categories: PC as a home theater, work PC and gaming PC.

Home cinema

Test conditions: playing one 720P HD movie in Media Player Classic, one 480P SD via VLC, downloading 3 movies through iTunes and recording one stream (15 minutes) 1080i HDTV via Windows Media Center.



In this test, the BX300 finished second, losing the OCZ VX500 512GB championship.

Work PC

Test conditions - 3 hours in an office environment with 32-bit Windows Vista, running Outlook 2007, connected to an Exchange server, browsing web pages using Chrome and IE8, editing files in Office 2007, viewing PDF files in Adobe Reader , an hour of local music playback and two hours of streaming music through Pandora.



Indicators are not the best, but still not the worst.

Gaming pc

In this test, it simulates disk activity while a computer game is running. In this simulation, 94% is reading, and the remaining 6% is recording. The test runs on 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate, pre-configured using Steam, and with games such as Grand Theft Auto 4, Left 4 Dead 2, and Mass Effect 2 that are already downloaded and installed.



With this test, our drive coped very poorly, with a creak giving 8020.11 IOPS, 431.65MB / S and 0.934 ms of latency.

Conclusion

BX300 retains the status of a good budget solution for those who finally decided to get rid of hard drives and switch to SSD. Its dimensions are also worthy of attention, since even users of ultrabooks will be able to use it.

Tests, the results of which we reviewed earlier, showed a rather average result. But Crucial didn’t plan to release a monster capable of tearing rivals apart. Their main task was to give people an affordable (in terms of price) drive with decent performance. And they did it perfectly.

Source: storagereview

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