Welcome to the first of hopefully a few reviews I will be doing.
What I have to review today is the Crucial MX100 256GB SSD, a very value oriented, high capacity drive that seems to hold fantastic performance despite its price: ~$110 USD
Before we get into the review and benchmarks, lets go over the specs of the lineup:
All drives:
- Marvell 88SS9189 controller
- Micron 16nm 128Gb MLC NAND
- 72TB Endurance
- Encryption: AES 256-bit, TCG Opal 2.0, IEEE-1667
- Three year warranty
128GB version
- 550MB/s Sequential Read
- 150MB/s Sequential Write
- 80K IOPS Random Read (4KB)
- 40K IOPS Random Write (4KB)
256GB version
- 550MB/s Sequential Read
- 330MB/s Sequential Write
- 85K IOPS Random Read (4KB)
- 70K IOPS Random Write (4KB)
512GB version
- 550MB/s Sequential Read
- 500MB/s Sequential Write
- 90K IOPS Random Read (4KB)
- 85K IOPS Random Write (4KB)
The drive itself comes in a very nondescript box that doesn't really tell you about the product or its performance
Inside the box we find the drive itself, a 7mm to 9.5mm spacer, and a key to Acronis True Image HD.
The drive itself is in a very nice aluminium casing with a great looking blue sticker on it.
Now the only complaint I have with it aesthetically is that the sticker is on the mounting hole side of the drive, which means that for some people as the "top" of the drive only has the hardware information.
Since we had a look at the drives, lets move on to the benchmarks
Test system:
- A10-6790K @4.0GHz
- Gigabyte GA-F2A88X-UP4
- G.Skill 2x4GB 2400MHz
- Seasonic S12II 620W
- Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
So I'm going to get this out of the way right now; this is my first SSD and I am highly impressed with what I've seen so far.
ATTO disk benchmark:
Cystal Disk Mark:
Anvil:
Based on these three benchmarks I am getting very mixed signals and I don't l know what to think about it. From these I can also see that the drive might need a little bit of a firmware update to get everything in order as the write speeds for the drive are above advertised but the read speeds are well below the advertised 550MB/s. But even with these issues the drive still performs quite well.
Conclusion:
All in all I am having a good experience with this drive, it has worked well from the second I started using it. My Windows boot times are dramatically cut to around 10-15 seconds and when I login process is instantaneous. I feel that this is the top drive in its price class because of the high capacity and decent performance it carries. If you are planning on building a new computer this is the first SSD you need to consider getting.
RECOMMENDED
if you have made it this far, thanks for reading my review, any feedback on this review is welcome