Following on from the roaring MX100, Crucial’s new strategy is to split its low-priced SSD range in two. The more advanced MX200 has hardware-based encryption, a power-loss protection circuit and SLC caching for some impressive endurance figures, at a slightly higher price than its predecessor does, while the BX100 drops these features and retains the MX100’s great value.
Quoted endurance is identical to the MX100, with 72TB of writes across the board, which is to be expected, given the BX100’s use of identical 16nm Micron MLC NAND, laid out in 128Gb chips.
Pricing is in the same low ballpark too, although the 250GB BX100 costs 32p per gigabyte, slightly more than the 31p offered by Kingston’s SSDNow V300 SSD 240GB, while the larger 500GB and 1TB drives drop to a phenomenal 30p, the lowest of all the SSDs on test. What really made the MX100 special was that, despite its low price, it didn’t make serious performance compromises. In both our synthetic and real-world tests, the BX100 retains this key characteristic.
It even comes close to the top of the chart in CrystalDiskMark’s sequential read test, with all three capacities topping 550MB/sec, beaten only by Samsung’s SSD 850 Pro. AS SSD shows similar figures, with the 500GB BX100 coming in second place at 528.7MB/ sec. The range drops slightly on sequential write speeds, though, with the 250GB model near to the bottom of the pack, managing 364MB/sec in AS SSD. Random read and write results aren’t spectacular either, although interestingly, the 250GB BX100 fares best in these tests.
The IOPS results are interesting too. The BX100 is slap bang in the middle of the chart, with the 250GB model on 34,948 and the 1TB drive getting 37,941. The difference between the top-performing SSD 850 Pro and the BX100 is around 25 per cent in this test, which isn’t bad considering that the BX100 costs around half the 850 Pro’s price.
However, in the all-important real-world tests, you can easily see the true value of the BX100 range. All three capacities are closer to the top of the chart than the bottom in the Photoshop Heavy and Microsoft Word tests, the BootRacer times for the 250GB and 500GB models are great (none of the 1TB drives did well here) and the Battlefield 3 trace is only one second slower than the topscoring SSDs. With the BX100, you don’t compromise on any real-world performance, but you pay the lowest price per gigabyte of any of the SSDs in this Labs.
Conclusion
The BX100s aren’t the very fastest drives around, and Crucial even states this fact on its website. Clearly, in terms of sequential speeds, there’s a gap between the BX100 and some pricier SSDs. But this gap seriously narrows in real-world performance, to the point where it would be hard to spot the difference between this drive and other, more expensive ones in general use. If you’re looking for great performance for a low price, the BX100 range delivers in spades, with the 500GB and 1TB drives hitting the bang per buck sweet spot.
VERDICT
Fantastic performance for a surprisingly low asking price.
CRUCIAL BX100 250GB – 90
CRUCIAL BX100 500GB – 92
CRUCIAL BX100 1TB – 92
