Crucial BX300 480GB SSD review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 1 of 20 Published by

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Introduction

Crucial BX300 480 GB 2.5" SSD
Proper value for money for your NAND based storage unit?

Crucial has outed their all new BX300 SSD series SSDs. These units are all about value for money. But it does not stop there as these puppies remain fast and very effective for the dough you lay down at that counter. We review the new 480GB model, the most price-competitive mainstream SSD with up-to high-end class SATA3 performance. The BX300 will only be released in three models initially, a 120GB, 240GB and 480GB version. The BX300 uses Micron 3D MLC NAND, paired with a bit of DRAM cache and likely an SLC written buffer as well. Our tested BX300 480 GB SSD is advertised at proper SATA3 SSD performance metrics with 555MB/s for sequential read and 510MB/s on sequential writes. Random 4K IOPS show numbers in the 95K for both random read and write IOPS.

Crucial basically offers two performance and price positioned series, MX and the slightly, lower positioned (affordable upgrade) BX series. The BX300 series what I label as value storage space, yet is very price-competitive compared to mainstream to high-end class SATA3 performance. You guys likely know it, I've been in the computer industry a LONG time and have noticed that two developments evolve in very fast paces, graphics cards and storage technology. If you look how far and fast we've become with NAND technology you can only acknowledge, it is just amazing. My first HDD storage unit was connected towards a Commodore 64, back in 1984 (!), that unit was SCSI based and could hold a whopping 10 MB of data, it did that (if memory serves me right) at roughly 40 KB/sec in read performance which was blazingly fast at that time and cost me something in the extent and equivalent of 500 USD / EURO. And yes  .. here we are in an era where NVMe SSDs reach 3 GB/sec and SSDs having storage capacities of 2 Terabyte priced at that same level $499 / €520,- It is these trends that drive SSD storage to the high level momentum in evolution as we see today: endurance, performance, price and capacity. The BX300 series sits in the middle of these brackets.

The Crucial BX300 480 GB SSD offers very decent speeds (for a SATA3 unit) and remains competitive in pricing. 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 550 MB/sec on SATA3 which is the norm for a proper single controller based SATA3 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 competitive, it brought us to where we are today. Proper volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has a HDD anymore, 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. 


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Micron (the mother company behind Crucial) have released the BX300 series, these drives are based on vertically stacked NAND (also referred to as 3D NAND) and are now available in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB. The storage units manage 555 MB/s and write speeds of up to 510 MB/s with 4K IOPS of performance in the 95K ranges for both reads and writes. While Micron did not release any deep-level details about the BX300, these SSDs are 3d v-nand units, very likely based on the new 64-layer node, also new .. it is paired towards a Silicon Motion SM2258XT controller. Crucial guarantees this SSD for 3 years under warranty and/or a 160 TB (terabytes) written (TBW) for this 480 GB model. Have a peek and then let's head onward into the review.

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