Crucial MX200 1TB

Crucial MX200 - Introduction People choose a Solid State Drive because they are faster than either classical Hard Disk Drive models, or Solid State Hybrid Devices. Unfortunately, while they are indeed incredibly fast, in years past they were also incredibly small and rather expensive. Basically if you wanted a solid state drive you had to be willing to give up a lot of capacity if you did not want to bust your budget. Crucial's MX series was designed to change that 'rule of thumb' as they offered great performance, but at a price that was a lot more palatable. This is why the original MX100 became a favorite of system builders and knowledgeable consumes alike; however since it was the first ever drive to make use of Micron's cutting edge 16nm NAND ICs Crucial was unable to wring every ounce of performance out of their MX100 series. This is why the MX100 was the more entry level orientated drive and the M550 was the more mainstream option. The MX200 on the other hand was designed to not only stay true to the design philosophy of being the best bang for the buck possible, but also set out to eliminate the largest complaint leveled against the MX100: its only middle of the road performance. To do precisely this Crucial did not radically change the design of the MX100. Instead the MX200 is best described as a 2nd generation drive. Much like Intel, the 2nd generation model is always the more refined and stable version and the MX200 is no exception. It is not only faster than the MX100 it also boasts over 3 times the durability of the MX200 with a class leading 320TB of writes. On its own this one-two combination of enhanced durability with enhanced performance makes the MX200 very special and worthy of being our first Solid State Drive to be reviewed; however Crucial was not just satisfied with offering the best mainstream drive, instead they also wanted their MX200 to be the best value imaginable. The end result is a price so low that it belies its mainstream performance offering, and instead is damn impressive for a low performance budget drive! With an asking price of only 34 cents per Gigabyte ($340), consumers can finally afford massive - for a solid state drive - 1 Terabyte Solid State Drive that is not 'entry level'. This does obviously beg the question on how much room is enough; and at what point do consumers really have to think long and hard about buying two solid state drives instead of the customary one SSD for the OS and a HDD or SSHD for the application and game drive. To this end we will not only be showing what one MX200 1TB can do, but two of them. Crucial MX200 - Specs and Features When the Crucial ® MX100 was released, it set a new standard for SSDs that the Crucial MX200 pushes even further. Leveraging leading specs on all fronts, along with new Dynamic Write Acceleration technology, the Crucial MX200 is loaded with innovative features and immediately increases your system’s performance. Do more. Faster. Longer. The Crucial MX200 delivers 555 MB/s sequential reads on both compressible and incompressible data, and outperforms a typical hard drive by 400 MB/s. 1 Even better, the performance doesn’t let up, as the Crucial MX200 posts an endurance rating that’s up to 5 times greater than a typical client SSD. 2 Transfer and save large files in a matter of seconds. Competing SSDs typically rely on a fixed cache of multi-level cell flash memory, which allows you to write sequential data at published specs, but only for so long. Our industry-leading Dynamic Write Acceleration technology solves this problem by using an adaptable pool of high speed, single-level cell flash memory for consistently fast performance that doesn’t let up. Max out performance and increase reliability. Our engineers created RAIN technology to protect your data at the component level, similar to how RAID is used with multiple hard drives. This technology increases the security and protection of your data to a level that’s rarely seen in consumer-class SSDs. Encrypt and protect your data at the highest possible level. Keep personal files and sensitive information secure from hackers and thieves with AES 256-bit encryption – the same grade used by banks and hospitals. The Crucial MX200 meets or exceeds all industry encryption standards, including Microsoft ® eDrive, IEEE-1667, and TCG Opal 2.0. Efficiency & Reliability Store up to 1TB of data and achieve a higher level of reliability than a hard drive or competing SSD. Run your system longer than ever before – using less power. With Extreme Energy Efficiency technology, the Crucial MX200 is over 2x more energy efficient than a typical hard drive. 3 Push your drive to the limit and avoid overheating. Adaptive Thermal Protection technology enables the Crucial MX200 to dynamically adjust storage component activity based on how you’re using the drive, allowing your storage system to stay cool. Keep your memories, photos, and files safe. When a photo or file gets corrupted, it often becomes unusable. Prevent this from happening in the first place with the Crucial MX200, which arms every storage component with four layers of Exclusive Data Defense. Crucial MX200 - Closer Look Under The Hood The shipping container which Crucial uses has always been conservatively elegant and the MX200 is no exception. Some may argue that this box is a touch too bland, and if you are used to garishly over the top boxes that some other companies use you may agree, we however think it is darn good. To us this box is eye catching without being an eyesore….and considering we have used, tested, and worked with nearly every model on the market today that is indeed high praise for us. The accessory list Crucial includes is actually darn good and above average. Not only do you get a 2.5mm adapter to turn the 7mm form-factored MX200 into a more 'typical' 9.5mm drive, you also get a serial for Acronis True Image HD. This software solution may not be as fully featured as the full version of Acronis' True Image application but it will make cloning your old drive to your new MX200 a snap. The only feature that is missing from this accessory list is a 3.5" adapter plate which makes installing it into a case easier. However, considering the low asking price and the fact a lot of cases now come with 2.5" drive mounting options this is not the concern it was even a few years ago. Moving on to the drive itself, it becomes readily obvious that the conservative shipping container was only a sign of things to come - as the drive itself is very conservative in its aesthetics. To be precise Crucial simply uses an elegant label to distinguish this MX200 model from its predecessor. We have no major issues with this as the drive will be housed inside a PC chassis so flashy labels and the like are usually a waste. Conversely, telling a MX100 from a MX200 is darn simple as that label is large and makes it rather easy to know what drive you have in your hand! What is more important than the color or labels used is the materials the SSD manufacture uses for the case itself. Crucial has always used metal and the MX200 is no exception. The only new twist on things is that the case is not held together with screws and instead uses integrated pressure clips to hold the top section to the bottom. Since the PCB itself is attached to one half via screws we have no problems with this change as even if you drop it hard enough to pop the chassis into its two pieces the PCB itself should be protected….and if it is dropped hard enough to damage the PCB anyways a couple screws would not have changed the outcome - a dead drive. Internally we can see the MX200 uses a fairly typical architectural layout. One side of the PCB houses 8 of the 16nm MLC NAND ICs and a single 256MB RAM cache IC, while the other has the remaining 8 NAND ICs, the Marvel '9189 controller, and the second 256MB RAM cache IC (for a grand total of 512MB - or half a Gigabyte of cache space). This is very similar to what a MX100 would look like as Crucial has not really changed the hardware all that much. Instead what they have changed and improved is the firmware. The new firmware takes all that they learned from the MX100 and M5xx series and creates a new amalgam that has all the performance aspects of the M5xx series with all the capacity of the MX100 series. Now with that being said these 16nm NAND ICs are more from a more mature process and they are faster and more durable than the 16nm NAND ICs in the MX100 series. Basically as with all things, the manufacturing process has been improved upon and the increase in durability and performance from the MX100 series speaks volumes for what can be done when knowledge, experience, and time are accounted for! Of especial note are the rows of small 'super caps' that Crucial have included. These capacitors allow the drive to ensure that all resting data is indeed safe and secure in case of sudden power loss. In other words if the lights go out, the chances of a corrupted drive are slim. They are however not zero. This is because the caps are not large enough to flush the ram buffers to the NAND, so any data that is stored here (AKA In Flight Data) will be lost. This ability is what separates 'enterprise' grade SSDs from 'consumer' grade; however Crucial's implementation is above average for the consumer marketplace as it can check both levels of the NAND to ensure all the 'at rest' data is correct and not corrupt. Crucial MX200 - Testing Methodology The reasons to purchase a high performance storage device are as varied as the consumers who purchase them. For some application load time is the deciding factor in their purchasing decision. For others it is Virtualized Operating System performance. For others still it is game load times. For others still it is to shave a .1 of second off their synthetic test scores so as to climb ever higher in the online rankings that various sites host. With such a wide variety of criteria it behooves us to use as wide and varied list of testing protocols as possible. As such we have used a blend of synthetic and real world benchmarks, as well as custom recorded real world game benchmarking. For custom game play we have chosen popular titles: Borderlands 2, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Saints Row 3. These games should give a good overview of the potential performance a given storage device will offer in real world game centric scenarios. For game load times testing we have chosen games which are clearly not Internet, GPU, RAM or CPU bottlenecked. The system was cold restarted in between each load to make sure no data saved in the GPU’s ram could influence load times. As with all tests all games were run four times and an average rounded the nearest second is recorded as the official result. For the Call of Duty: Ghosts we timed the level load time for the map called Into the Deep in the single player game. This level was chosen as it contains a large map and loads a lot of data from the storage device to the GPU. For Borderlands 2 we have recorded the time it takes to fast travel from Sanctuary map to Oasis. Oasis is the beginning of the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty DLC. This was chosen as it not only is a special level not included in the original Borderlands 2 game and thus contains additional data which should slow the load of this special map. For Saints Row 3 (labelled ‘SR3’ in the chart) we have recorded the load time from a specific save game. The game was saved just at the end of the ‘Shaundi saved’ version of “Three Way Ending” but before the cut scene. This was chosen as the game not only loads the Three Way Ending data but also the next level “Gangsta’s in Space” DLC level. For synthetic tests we used a combination of the ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS-SSD, Crystal Disk Benchmark, HDTach, HD Tune, and IOMeter. For real world (non-gaming orientated) testing we have used OS startup, Adobe Photoshop, VMWare, and data transfer times. For data transfer we timed how long a single 30GB rar file took to copy to and then from the devices. We also used 15gb of small files (from 100kb to 200MB) with a total 36,000 files in 1200 subfolders. All tests were run 4 times and average results are represented. To ensure optimum performance in between each test run the device was sanitary erased. Main Test System Processor: Intel i7 5930K Memory: 32GB (4x8GB) Crucial Ballistic Elite Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth X99 Cooling: Noctua U12S SSD: 1x Intel 750 1.2TB NVMe SSD Power Supply: Corsair AX860i Monitor: Dell U2714H OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 Crucial MX200 - HD Tune Pro Read Bandwidth For this benchmark, HD Tune Pro was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these storage devices. We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and thus we no longer included it. The most important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem. Write Performance For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have. As expected the MX200 posts very impressive numbes in the sequential read and write tests. More important is that this model's performance scales nicely when in RAID. Crucial MX200 - ATTO Disk Benchmark The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drives read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second. These performance curves are downright phenomenal from a drive that costs only 34 cents per gigabyte. Honestly not that long ago this is the kind performance you would expect from a 80-90 cent per GB drive. That is damn impressive. Crucial MX200 - Crystal DiskMark Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5 and size at 100MB. In RAID or out of it the new MX200 is noticeably better than its predecessors and it is simply outclassing SSHD and HDDs - some of which cost even more than it does. Crucial MX200 - AS-SSD AS-SSD is designed to quickly test the performance of your drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and small 4K read/write speeds as well as 4K file speed at a queue depth of 6. While its primary goal is to accurately test Solid State Drives, it does equally well on all storage mediums it just takes longer to run each test as each test reads or writes 1GB of data. Just as with Crystal DiskMark, the AS-SSD performance results put to bed any idea of this simply being a 'value' drive; instead it is a darn good mainstream drive that can even compete against 'enthusiast grade' (SATA based) solid state drives. The only way anyone will get noticeably better is by going NVMe (ala Intel 750 series). Crucial MX200 - IOMETER: File Server Test To test each drive we ran 6 test runs per device (1,4,16,64,128,256 queue depth) each test having 8 parts, each part lasting 10 min w/ an additional 20 second ramp up. The 6 subparts were set to run 100% random, 75% read 25% write; testing 512b, 4k,8k,16k,32k,64k size chunks of data. When each test is finished IOMeter spits out a report, in that reports each of the 6 subtests are given a score in I/Os per second. We then take these 8 numbers add them together and divide by 6. This gives us an average score for that particular queue depth that is heavily weighted for file server usage. This is one of the few areas where more robust - and expensive - solutions like the G.Skill Phoenix Blade are obviously more optimal solutions. With that being said the MX200 does still acquit itself in this test, a test that is way outside its designed consumer niche! Crucial MX200 - System Boot Time When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. While all the other tests were run with a Windows 7 operating system, this particular test uses another older test bed's “day to day” OS (copied over to our new testbed) which has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up. In one generation Crucial was able to boost start-up times by nearly 24%. That is how much better Crucial has gotten with working with the 16nm ONFi 3 NAND ICs - and it is bloody marvelous. Crucial MX200 - Real World Data Transfers No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter is, it cannot really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. To this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 30.00GB contiguous file, then a folder containing 1200 subfolders with a total 36,000 files varying in length from 200mb to 100kb (15.00 GB total). Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found. As with nearly all the test result to date the MX200 performs admirably in and out of RAID configurations. Of course with only two drives in a software based RAID 0 configuration the small file performance does not drastically improve - but it does improve. Crucial MX200 - ADOBE CS6 LOAD TIME Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible! Adobe actually showed the largest increase in performance between this 2nd generation MX drive compared to the first generation. Basically over 28% improvement is fantastic. Crucial MX200 - VMWare Load Time Performance VMWare is a powerful application which allows users the ability to run a virtualized Operating System from inside their main OS. This program is not only processor and RAM intensive but puts significant load on the storage subsystem with deep, heavy read/write IO requests to the drive. To help give you a general idea on the performance improvements from running a RAM Drive we have timed the time it takes to load XP SP3 from inside VMWare. VMWare obviously loves Solid State Drives and while the PCIe based 'Blade is faster the MX200 is certainly more than capable of making VMware less of a hog than it is when trying to use it on SSHD or HHDs. Crucial MX200 - Game Load Times Borderlands 2 Load time For Borderlands 2 we have recorded the time it takes to fast travel from Sanctuary map to Oasis. Oasis is the beginning of the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty DLC. This was chosen as it not only is a special level not included in the original Borderlands 2 game and thus contains additional data which should slow the load of this special map. CoD: Ghosts Load time For the Call of Duty: Ghosts we timed the level load time for the map called Into the Deep in the single player game. This level was chosen as it contains a large map and loads a lot of data from the storage device to the GPU. Saints Row 3 Load time For Saints Row 3 (labelled ‘SR3’ in the chart) we have recorded the load time from a specific save game. The game was saved just at the end of the ‘Shaundi saved’ version of “Three Way Ending” but before the cut scene. This was chosen as the game not only loads the Three Way Ending data but also the next level “Gangsta’s in Space” DLC level. If you hate game load times, you really want to be using a SSD - and the MX200 would be an excellent choice. Crucial MX200 - Partial and Full Drive Performance While it is important to know how a drive will perform under optimal conditions, more realistic scenarios are just as important. Knowing how drive will behave when partially or even nearly full than when it is empty is very important information to know. To quickly and accurately show this crucial information we have first filled the drive to 50% capacity and re-tested using both synthetic and real world tests. After the completion of this we then re-test at 75% and 90% of full capacity. Synthetic Test Results For our synthetic testing we have opted for our standard VMWare test. Real World Results For a real world application we have opted for our standard Adobe CS6, and Saints Row 3 tests. The more we use and test this drive the more impressed we are with what it has to offer. Yes you will lose performance as the drive is filled, but with 1TB of capacity it is relatively easy to make sure that there is more than enough free space to keep performance in the nose bleed section of the ballpark. Crucial MX200 - Summary and TL;DR In an effort to make sorting through all the results as easy as possible we have combined the results all of all the test results into an easy to digest summary format. By comparing this drive tosimilar products in all the various tests you will be able to easily find the result(s) you are interested in, see the improvement and decide if this model is worth the investment. It really is amazing how much more mature manufacturing process and more mature firmware can make - as these improved results highlight quite nicely! Score Card and Summary Performance: 35 out of 40. While there are indeed faster options available the MX200 is no slouch in the performance department. To be blunt this drive is the epitome of diminishing returns in that if you spend more for a 'faster' drive, the differences will be harder to spot in real world scenarios. Technological Innovation: 17 out of 20 While not exactly innovative, the MX200's performance results show that 16nm is now ready for primetime. Instead of simply being good enough to compete against Samsung's' TLC NAND options, this NAND and controller combination is good enough to compete with any SATA solid state drive. That to us is even more impressive. Build Quality & Warranty: 18 out of 20 With a total bytes written that is 3X the normal amount, a solid metal chassis, and first pick on the best of any batch of 16nm ONFi 3 NAND Micron / IMFT produce there really is not much to complain about. The only thing is missing Flush In Flight abilities as the onboard caps are not large enough to protect the data in the ram cache. Value: 18 out of 20 This drive is a fantastic value and is easily one of the best deals you can find in the consumer SSD marketplace right now. We do however have to deduct a point for no 3.5" adapter plate, and another for a three instead of five year warranty. You may feel differently on this and may consider it a perfect 20 out of 20 Final Score: 88 out of 100 From its relatively reasonable price, to its cavernous capacity, to excellent performance the MX200 1TB makes an excellent argument in why you should choose it - and a friend for RAID 0 goodness - over more expensive SSDs, cheaper HDDs, and even compromise middle of the road SSHDs. Crucial MX200 - Closing Statement Quite honestly the MX200 series in general and the MX200 1TB in specific is easily one of the best deals to be found in the consumer marketplace right now. This is not all that surprising as Crucial has dominated this corner of the market for years and have been a driving force behind lower and lower price per GB models for just as long a period of time. What is surprising is that thanks to the MX200 series they not only dominate the value end, but also the mainstream end of the marketplace. Yes there are faster, there are certainly cheaper, and there are even larger options available to consumers; but the MX200 drive has the best blend of all these attributes available today. Simply put, the MX200's blend of performance, price, capacity, and yes even value simply make it too good a drive to pass up. This drive's value is so good that while $340 for a 'D' drive is still on the upper end of reasonable, there are a lot of reasons to go this route instead of the typical Hard Disk Drive route. When compared to 'fast' extoic solutions that try to satisfy both capacity and cost like the Seagate Desktop SSHD series, those solutions simply look like the compromise that they are - and really do not satisfy either budget or performance concerns. As for hard drives, even the speediest of HDDs are not even in the same league as the MX200 - and can't even really claim to be all that cheaper anymore either. As we said this series delicately walks the tight rope between performance and price with a deftness and finesse that is rarely seen. With that being said, while the MX200 does indeed offer more than enough performance and more than enough capacity to satisfy mainstream consumers it will not be right for all consumers. Consumers who crave bleeding edge performance and do not mind dropping the cost of an entry level system on a single storage device will still flock to the Intel 750 series. Conversely consumers who need more room than what the MX200 series has to offer will still be better served by HDD and SSHD drives from Seagate, Western Digital, etc. That however are the only two groups of consumers who will not be fully satisfied with the MX200 has to offer. The typical enthusiast, down to the entry level consumer, to even the typical mainstream consumer will invariably be impressed with what Crucial were able to create. If you are looking for a new storage device, you really would be doing a disservice to yourself if you do not give the MX200 series the long hard look it deserves.

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