Business or pleasure? Crucial MX200 and BX100 1TB SSDs

Take your pick, and don't worry about the price tag

Compare and contrast

The flagship 1TB MX200 (and the 500GB 2.5in version for that matter) doesn’t have the DWA enabled, so with the same controller and 16nm NAND as the flagship MX100 (512GB) drive it’s interesting to see if the firmware updates to the write technologies have any other effect on performance – other than that colossal increase in endurance.

ATTO benchmark

ATTO benchmark – longer bars are better

CrystalDiskMark 3 benchmark

Sequential throughput – longer bars are better

4K files throughput – longer bars are better

50GB assorted files transfer test

50GB Write to SSD: 28,523 files, various sizes – longer blue bars and shorter green bars are better

Looking at the results from the benchmarks I used that would be a no. The sequential write performance from the ATTO benchmark was a little better than the specified 500MB/s at 519MB/s but the reads were a fair bit off at 526MB/s but that might just be my review drive as apart from that the two drives were pretty equally matched.

Drive info on the Crucial Storage Executive. Windows only though – bah!

Announced at the same time as two new drive ranges is the long-awaited Crucial SSD toolbox or, to give it its formal name, the Crucial Storage Executive – posh eh? With it you can update firmware, monitor the drive, securely erase it and reset the drive’s encryption password. As it stands, at the time of writing, the CSE is compatible with Windows 7 and higher and supports the M500, M550, MX100 and the two new drives.

A nice pair: Crucial's BX100 and MX200 SSDs

The Reg Verdict

Each of the drives brings something new to the table. With the BX100 it’s the Silicon Motion controller, the first time that this controller has been used in a Crucial device. Despite what Crucial says, it performs pretty well for a drive labelled as a budget product.

At least the MX200 brings a new write technology to some of the range but the most surprising thing about it is the huge leap in endurance over the previous drive range, thanks to the tweaks to the write technologies in the firmware. So depending on how important certain features are, Crucial will flog you a big fast drive with just 50 quid between them. ®