Crucial BX200 960GB

Big, cheap, a little bit borked

CRUCIAL IS THE RETAIL arm of the monster memory manufacturing outfit that is Micron. It’s Micron, along with its partner Intel, that is promising to totally revolutionize solid-state memory, with its new 3D XPoint technology toward the end of this year. Put simply, Micron is undoubtedly a major player in solid-state memory. Via its Crucial brand, it has consistently produced great SSDs.

We therefore had high hopes for its latest budget drive, the BX200. Priced at $260 for this near-1TB model, the BX200 offers epic bang for your buck. Under the hood, there’s an updated version of the Silicon Motion SSD controller Crucial used in the old BX100, along with Micron’s latest 16nm TLC NAND memory.

Peak performance is up slightly on the BX100. However, a significant drop in claimed 4K read performance versus the BX100—down to 66K IOPS from 90K IOPS—is the first indication that the BX200 may not actually represent flawless progress.

In terms of benchmark performance, it puts in a decent enough showing in most of the synthetic tests. Sequential reads and writes are up around 450MB/s or more, regardless of what benchmark tool you prefer to use. It looks pretty solid for 4K random access performance, too, edging out the budget opposition, including the SanDisk SSD PLUS and Kingston SSDNow.

However, we couldn’t help notice a major drop-off in performance when transferring our test files during the setup process, and that was a harbinger of badness to come. In our 30GB real-world file copy benchmark, the BX200 was dog slow, and required nearly 2.5 times as long to complete the test as the budget SanDisk drive.

As for the reason why, the explanation at least in part involves the sluggish program and erase times that come with the transition to triple-level NAND from the twolevel NAND used in the BX100. But, whatever the reason, there’s no avoiding the disappointing conclusion: Crucial’s budget SSDs used to be no-brainers—not any more.