Crucial MX300 750GB SSD review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 366 Page 1 of 19 Published by

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Introduction

Crucial MX300 750GB 2.5" SSD
Mainstream on a budget reaches High-End SATA3

Crucial (Micron) has updated the MX300 to a larger capacity selection. As such, we review the 750 GB version of this SSD that offers excellent speed yet remains competitive in pricing as the product is priced at €199, which boils down to €0,26 per GB. Armed with very decent performance and that attractive pricing, Crucial will once again set the tone in a fierce and saturated NAND flash storage arena.

As you guys know, we've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning, and it is surprising to see where we have gotten. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though. While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing at as fast a pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking! You get between 450 MB/s to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 which is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that, over the past year, NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices a year ago settled at just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. These days a good SSD can be found under 50 cents per GB. With parties like Samsung, Toshiba and Micron the prices have now dropped towards and below the 30 cents per GB marker. This means that SSD technology and NAND storage has gone mainstream and due to the lower prices, the volume sizes go up as well. A couple of years ago a 64 GB SSD was hot stuff, then slowly we moved to 120 GB, last year 240 GB for an SSD in a PC was the norm, this upcoming year we'll transition slowly to roughly 500 GB per SSD as the norm with sub 150 USD prices. With the market being so huge, fierce and competitive, it brought us to where we are today... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has a HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive and retrieve my bigger chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise. 

Micron have released the larger capacity product series that many of you have been waiting for, the MX300 series. These drives are based on vertically stacked NAND (also referred to as 3D NAND) and are now available in 275 GB, 525 GB, 750 GB and 1 TB capacities. With a low power design, this drive will be among the mainstream to fastest SSDs we have ever tested. It’s not just about performance though, these units manage 530 MB/s and write speeds of up to 510 MB/s with 4K IOPS of performance in the 80K to 90K ranges for both reads and writes. While Micron did not release any precise details about the MX300, these SSDs are TLC based. With vertically stacked NAND, Micron can reach 32-layers of memory cells (384 Gbit) which is 48 GB per IC used. Now, 750GB is not a particularly common SSD size, yet that 384Gb (48GB) IC TLC written capacity I just mentioned results in an increased capacity when compared to MLC SSDs. E.g. less material used creates less expensive products. Crucial guarantees this 750GB SSD for 3 years under warranty and/or 220 terabytes written (TBW). 

Have a peek and then let's head onward into the review.


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