Crucial MX300 2050GB Raid

Crucial MX300 2050GB - Introduction Very recently we had the privilege of putting a pair of Crucial MX300 1050GB drives through their paces and walked away very impressed with what they had to offer consumers in and out of RAID based scenarios. One thing that we did mention though was the fact that the '1TB' model was not the largest and we had a real craving to find out what the '2TB' monster could offer. Today we are going to get to scratch that itch and show how much better – or worse – the 2050GB capacity version really is. As Crucial is the consumer retail 'face' for Micron these massive capacity Solid State Drives are not a 'halo' product put out in very limited capacity for bragging rights. Instead of 'oh look we broke the 2TB barrier!!!' PR spin this model is readily and easily available at darn near retail chain that offers the 1050GB model. That alone makes the 2050GB rather impressive and underscores how fast IMFT has ramped up production of their new '3D' TLC NAND. Equally important is even though this is the flagship capacity model – for now – it does not come with the usual mega-sized price premium. Instead just as with the smaller capacity versions it costs a mere 25 cents per Gigabyte… though with 2050GB worth of capacity that does make the final total of about 512 (US) dollars a tad on the high side for the average budget. But it is a heck of a lot better than what previous plus size models came with. To be blunt yes it is a lot of money but it does offer a lot of room in a small package. As we will show you in this review this 2TB model is not just about offering more storage capacity. Instead it also is about performance. You see all MX300 models come with a factory/firmware set pseudo-SLC write cache buffer. As we have shown in the past this SLC portion is much, much faster than the typical SSD at write requests. Since it is hard set the bigger the capacity… the bigger this buffer – and holy Christmas does this monster have a big buffer. It is HUGE, it is CHINA big… and yet oddly enough does not come in an orange facade or come with a giant ego. Instead this is one of the easiest drives tested to date to work with. So sit back, relax and watch as we obviously enjoy ourselves as we put two of their beasts through their paces. Win, lose or draw it certainly is going to be one hell of a ride! Crucial MX300 2050GB - Specifications and Features <img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6261 lazy-loaded" src="https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec1-1.jpg" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" srcset="https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec1-1.jpg 730w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec1-1-300x177.jpg 300w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec1-1-50x30.jpg 50w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec1-1-300x177@2x.jpg 600w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec1-1-50x30@2x.jpg 100w" alt="spec1-1" data-lazy-type="image" data-src="https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec1-1.jpg" data-srcset="" /> <img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6260 lazy-loaded" src="https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec2-1.jpg" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" srcset="https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec2-1.jpg 730w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec2-1-300x197.jpg 300w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec2-1-50x33.jpg 50w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec2-1-300x197@2x.jpg 600w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec2-1-50x33@2x.jpg 100w" alt="spec2-1" data-lazy-type="image" data-src="https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec2-1.jpg" data-srcset="" /> <img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6262 lazy-loaded" src="https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec3-1.jpg" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" srcset="https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec3-1.jpg 730w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec3-1-300x170.jpg 300w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec3-1-620x350.jpg 620w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec3-1-50x28.jpg 50w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec3-1-300x170@2x.jpg 600w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec3-1-50x28@2x.jpg 100w" alt="spec3-1" data-lazy-type="image" data-src="https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec3-1.jpg" data-srcset="" /> <img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6259 lazy-loaded" src="https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec4-1.jpg" sizes="(max-width: 730px) 100vw, 730px" srcset="https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec4-1.jpg 730w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec4-1-300x242.jpg 300w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec4-1-50x40.jpg 50w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec4-1-300x242@2x.jpg 600w, https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec4-1-50x40@2x.jpg 100w" alt="spec4-1" data-lazy-type="image" data-src="https://realhardwarereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spec4-1.jpg" data-srcset="" /> Crucial MX300 2050GB - A Closer Look While there is no denying that the MX300's shipping container is just as elegant as its predecessors, the fact remains this is actually a much lower key box. By swapping out the black and silver box of the MX200 for a mostly gray one Crucial really has opted for an even more conservative looking package. Though in a market filled with garish and over the top 'look at me' shipping containers seemingly focused in on the thirteen-year-old this box will actually be more than eye catching than the MX200! The accessory list Crucial includes is basically the same as what ships with the MX200 series – that is to say darn decent. Not only do you get a 2.5mm adapter to turn the 7mm form-factored MX300 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 SSD 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. The MX300 itself is also a testament to the conservative approach to SSD design. The top main label is classic Crucial 'MX' black, blue and silver that contrasts nicely with the all silver metal chassis, while the bottom 'information' label is white with black text. One nice thing is the bottom label's top right corner explicitly states in bold lettering precisely what capacity version of the MX300 you are holding in your hand. This does make finding a particular MX300 in a pile of them much easier than it otherwise would be. Very nice… and exactly the same as all the smaller MX300's we have looked at in the past. Just as with the MX300 150GB review previously, before we crack open these drives and show the internals, a bit of explanation is in order about the oddball capacity rating. Basically, the new TLC 3D NAND has a density of 384Gbits per 'layer' (and yes even though this new NAND is built like an apartment building you can stack a layer upon top of another… or a fully-fledged apartment on top of another apartment) instead of 128Gbit (MLC) or 256GBit (TLC) like planar (2D) NAND in previous generations. This does lead to some rather odd combinations. For example, the typical '2TB' SSD is actually 2048GB… but 2048GB does not divide evenly into 48GB (384Gbits). So Crucial either had to go lower than the competition at 42 layers (2016GB) or higher with 43 layers (2064GB – the actual on-die amount this drive has though this extra 16GB is 'over-provisioning' that is not accessible by the system. Only the controller can access it and use these free blocks to replace bad blocks, wear leveling etc. etc.) Crucial decided to be generous and give us more rather than less. This is explains why instead of 250GB, 500GB, 1TB or 2TB; MX300's are 275GB, 550, 1050GB and 2050GB. Consider this unintended consequence of using mega-density NAND a nice little bonus. It is also worth noting that the built in over-provisioning of the 2050GB is actually 2.66 times bigger than the 1050GB (16GB vs 6GB). This is because the 2050GB model is not exactly twice as big. Its 50GB smaller than twice. In order to have made it 2100GB they would have had to add in an extra layer to one of the ICs – making it 44 layers or 2112GB in size. We doubt many will notice the 'loss' of 50GB considering the extra OP does boost performance and reliability. Though by not doubling the capacity perfectly the one annoying thing is 43 layers is not easily divided into 4 channels. Instead, one of the four channels of the Marvell 88SS1074 4-channel controller used will be missing a layer (three channels will have 11 layers of NAND interleaving while the fourth will only have ten). This is not that big a deal either as there does come a point when more 'NAND interleaving' does not equate to better performance. Put another way, and putting our Bill Gates hat on for a second, 10 layers should be enough for any controller. Now with that taken care of as you can see the MX300 2050 actually makes use of the same 3/4 length PCB and houses the exact same number of NAND ICs (eight 'chips' to be precise). Instead of using a bigger PCB with four more 'chips' Crucial has made the decision to simply stack them deeper on the MX300 2050GB than on the 1050GB capacity model. To be precise there are four NW849 eight layers ICs (384GB per 'chip'), there are three NW853 three layer ICs (144GB) and two NW852 dual layer ICs (96GB). This certainly is an odd combination as the eight layer ICs will run slightly hotter than the dual layers…but with the case acting as a heatsink it really is not that big a deal. All should run with in normal temperature limits and thermal limiting should be a really, really rare occurrence. What is interesting is the fact that Crucial actually makes a 16 layer deep TLC NAND IC! That is a whopping 768GB per chip… and since a full length PCB version could handle 12 ICs easily that means a 9.2TB monster is not only possible but actually practical…. assuming enough people could justify spending a cool $2,300(USD) for a single SSD that is. In the early days we have and did… so we really hope they make one – or at the very least a 4TB or 6TB capacity version. Now one thing you may be asking yourself is with 43 layers why did they not just use five 5 layer NAND chips and three 6 layer NAND chips?! Wouldn’t that make more sense than a hodge-podge of 1,3 and 8 layers?! Well the answer is pretty straightforward: they don’t make 5 or 6 layer ICs. Right now Micron manufactures ONFi 4.0 677Mt/s '3D' TLC NAND in 1,2,3,4,8 and 16 layer configurations… and the combination used was the best compromise without needless increasing heat via using fewer (but 'taller') NAND ICs. Moving on we can see that Crucial has indeed doubled the onboard RAM capacity from 512MB to a whopping 1GB via two 512MB LP-DDR3 Ram cache chips. This in combination with impressive NAND interleaving should help boost performance all the way into the stratosphere. To further boost performance the MX300 series also sets aside a portion of the NAND to use in what is best describe as pseudo-SLC mode. Much like smaller MX200s what the controller does is use an entire TLC cell in 1-bit mode… just as if it was SLC NAND. It then uses this space as a short-term cache for random writes and once the controller feels confident that this data is indeed needed for long term storage then – and only then - is it written to the TLC NAND portion of the drive. Doing this is a lot gentler on the TLC NAND as the wear and tear of physically changing the cell from a 0 to 1 state is a lot less than with the usual six states a TLC cell has. This is a big reason why the MX300 2050GB can boast a 400TB Total Byte Written specification and excellent write performance. The only downside is that the capacity of the cell is only 1/3 of what it originally was. To put that another way to create a 20GB cache buffer requires sixty gigabytes worth TLC NAND. Personally, we would love to be able to manually control the size of this buffer (and create a 680GB 'SLC' SSD) but Crucial does not allow that. Also, unfortunately Crucial has hard set the buffer size and no longer uses a 'floating' capacity buffer like the MX200 series makes use of. This is because it did cause the occasional hiccup if the drive was quickly filled and a main priority of the MX300 series is performance consistency. Another bonus of using a NAND based secondary cache buffer is the controller can quickly empty its RAM buffer and thus reduce the chance and amount of 'in flight' data becoming corrupted in the event of an unexpected power loss. To further reduce the chance of data loss the MX300 has a copious number of onboard capacitors that will allow the controller to do complete any writes that are ongoing, update its logs and then when the power is restored it can figure out what data in the SLC cache can be deleted and which needs to be transferred to the TLC portion of the NAND. The only data that will be lost is 'in flight' data stored in the RAM… but once again this amount is limited and since no Acknowledgement ('Ack') code is sent to the OS before it is written the NAND, the OS should not be expecting those changes to have been made. This doubling up of redundancy, triple if you include the ECC that also reduces uncorrectable data errors, means the MX300 may not have enterprise grade data loss protection but it is a lot closer than what most consumer grade drives do. Crucial MX300 2050GB - 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 a 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 f 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 MX300 2050GB - Read/Write Benchmarks 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. The sequential file performance of this new series is everything you could expect from a SATA AHCI based model. That is to say very good. 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. In and out of RAID scenarios the MX300 2050GB SSD is impressive. A lot of this is of course due to the fact that it uses a mega sized pseudo-SLC cache buffer… but users really do not care about the 'how' or the 'why' and only that it does… and boy does it ever do just that. 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. 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. Finally we get to see what the MX300 series looks like when its firing on all cylinders. This model really is the 'MX300 unleashed'… and holy Christ(mas) is it a sight to behold. 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. Crucial's MX series has never been targeted at the workstation marketplace so it comes as little surprise that the MX300 is not great at such tasks. By the same token when you combine two of them in a simple RAID they do produce rather impressive workstation-esque performance. Color us impressed. Crucial MX300 2050GB -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. 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. In and out of RAID the 2050GB is easily the pick of the MX300 litter. Its combination of massive onboard RAM with a massively over-sized SLC write cache buffer really does make all the difference. 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! 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. While the MX300 series was never intended for these types of scenarios the 2050GB model would have to believing otherwise! This mainstream drive really can whistle the tune and make you believe it was an enthusiast orientated model… just without the enthusiast grade price tag. 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. Good god this drive is fast. So fast that it makes other models, which cost a lot more per GB than it, look slow. That mega-sized SLC buffer with mega-sized RAM buffer really does make a world of difference. 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. While Marvell based units have gained a reputation for performance droop the combination of a whopping 1GB onboard ram cache with a pseudo-SLC write buffer that is mind boggling large does limit this issue nicely. Simply put the MX300 2050GB is the best Marvell based unit we have ever seen. Crucial MX300 2050GB - Performance 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 to similar 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. We must admit to being shocked at how good this mega-sized drive really is. Usually there is a point where consumers must trade-off performance in order to gain more storage capacity… but obviously with the MX300 series that point is well above 2TB. Color us impressed. Crucial MX300 2050GB - Score Card and Summary Performance :37 out of 40. Even though this is the one of the largest SATA solid state drives on the market right now you would never tell it by its performance. This model not only meets the smaller capacity versions' abilities but actually exceeds them. Brilliant stuff! Technological Innovation :18 out of 20 As with the 1050GB MX300 before it, the only thing that would have made this a perfect 20 out of 20 is if Crucial had opted for a NVMe controller instead of Marvell's SATA AHCI controller. Besides this 'issue', the MX300 is packed to the rafters with Innovation. Build Quality & Warranty: 19 out of 20 Like all Crucial MX300's the 2050GB is built to exceedingly high standards – right down to including physical data lose protection abilities. On the warranty front a three year warranty is a touch disappointing as Toshiba, Intel, and even newcomers like PNY now offer longer warranties. However, Crucial has a stellar reputation for making the RMA experience as painless as possible so what it lacks in length it more than makes up for in quality. Value: 19 out of 20 When you combine good performance with amazing capacity the end result is a drive that is packed with as much value as it is technological innovation. Now if Crucial would only release a NVMe model and do for the enthusiast class what they have done – with the MX300 – for the mainstream consumer! Final Score: 93 out of 100 Thanks to its combination of sheer size, nimble performance and impressive flexibility the MX300 2050GB easily justifies its asking price. Color us impressed! Crucial MX300 2050GB - Closing Statement As we saw throughout the testing stages the 2050GB MX300 is the pick of the MX300 litter - its performance is simply phenomenal. The reason for this is because the amount of pseudo-SLC cache is downright massive. So much so that even enthusiasts will have a tough, tough time saturating this write 'buffer' and it will only be workstation users who ever find it to be a bottleneck. When you then mix in twice the onboard cache with this super-sized SLC-cache the end result is truly outstanding performance in a wide range of scenarios. Quite honestly if you can afford the asking price this is the MX300 version to get and it really is the true successor to the MX200 series. Yes it is costly… but it does not cost anymore per Gigabyte than its smaller predecessors. In a future review will explore an alternative to this monster drive for those who cannot afford its asking price (which is darn reasonable to be honest), but it really is a great choice for those whose budget's can stretch far enough to accommodate it. This was not all that unexpected, but what really did impress us is the fact that this series has an amazing ability to grow and expand. Very few mega-sized models are able to outperform their smaller brethren but this one can, and does. Equally impressive is that we know that if the demand is there Crucial will not be stopping at 2TB. After all there is room for an additional four NAND ICs inside the 2.5" form-factor… and Micron does offer in denser ICs – that top out at a whopping 16 layers per die! That to us is what makes this MX300 2050GB not only a great drive in its own right but a hint of things to come. Whether or not the demand for even large models is there remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain Crucial really hit it out of the park with their MX300 series. Its flexibility and frugality really cannot be overstated.

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