MX100 512GB

$214 Crucial

For over half a year now, I’ve recommended Crucial’s MX100 to anyone looking for a high capacity SSD to store games on. It’s true that it’s one of Crucial’s budget range SSDs, but the 512GB MX100 is up there with the best SATA drives in performance.

Since its release, tech giant Samsung has unveiled new professional and consumer drives of its own, and still the MX100 512GB is my top pick for the everyday gamer. The MX200 will be here soon, but I still think the original has a place, because at the 500GB level they’ll perform the same.

The MX100 128GB and 256GB versions are not worth a look because their performance drops off a cliff. It’s down to the type of memory used. It might seem strange, but it’s the fact all three use exactly the same memory technology that puts the smaller drives on the don’t-buy list.

Crucial used the NAND flash of its parent company, Micron, which itself drove down the cost of the MX100. But it also used the highest density available at the time: 128Gbit memory. It matters because SSD memory controllers—like the Marvell one Crucial use—thrive on parallelism. The more memory chips, the more memory channels they will feed at any one time and the better that drive will perform.

In the MX100 range, the 512GB has twice the memory chips of the 256GB, more again than the 128GB drive, and so it outperforms both.

On Crucial’s higher level M550 range only the 512GB and 1TB drives use 128Gbit NAND. By a quirk of design the 512GB MX100 uses the same density memory and the same number of chips as its more expensive brother and so offers the same level of performance.

The MX100 may not be the fastest or most advanced drive in this test, but when all SATA drives are limited by the 600MB/s ceiling the minor performance differences between this drive and the 512GB Samsung 850 Pro start to look meaningless. If you’re looking for speedy, reliable storage at a great price for your existing PC, it’s almost impossible to recommend anything else.

The more memory chips, the better that drive will perform