Crucial MX300 525GB and 1050GB SSD Review

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Drives like this don't appeal as much to the enthusiast directly, but they still benefit everyone. Performance is plenty good for most mainstream systems, and as cost per GB decreases they displace HDDs in more OEM systems. This is great because it makes it a lot easier to suggest an SSD model to budget-minded purchasers. We're still not quite where I want to be, but getting there. In the not-so-distant future I can envision building a system with a next-gen NV boot drive and 3D TLC storage drive(s), taking the place of my current SSD/HDD setup.

Oh, and I'm really hoping the cable part of the PCIe 4.0 standard takes hold. I'd rather go that route than multiple M.2 drives.
 
Thanks for the benchies, Chris. I wish the SSD Charts would still be getting updated! (hint, hint)

BTW, I always liked the end-to-end data protection features in Crucial's MX series. To my knowledge, they and Intel's 500-series drives are the only ones to offer this in the consumer segment. Is that (still) correct?
 
Man, I take my eyes of the SSD segment for a little bit and the whole landscape changed! I bought all of the SSDs in my house back when they were ~$1/GB. For what I paid for my 500GB of SSD storage I could be looking at 2TB next month. That is just crazy.

I guess the real question in my mind is when I rebuild my rig in ~2 years will I go for a 500GB-1TB performance m.2? Or a larger 2TB SATA drive? Or, if things keep droping in price like this will I be able to afford both?
Or better yet, will these drop in price enough to start replacing HDDs in my NAS box? Hmm... decisions decisions.
 
The next 2 years will make the previous 2 years look static, by comparison. Expect $/GB to drop much further, and significant performance improvements. nvDIMMs will be on the scene, too.

BTW, M.2 doesn't necessarily connote NVMe. Although, by the time you upgrade, it'll probably be the norm.
 
I have the 500GB EVO 850 and am happy with it, but if I were looking for a new SSD, the 1050 would be on my short list for a 1TB drive. Absolute raw performance numbers are not be as important to me as having that extra 50GB which is an entire Steam game install these days.
 
I can't wait for the day that I can replace all my 4TB and 8TB disks with some solid storage, right now I can either go with enterprise grade disks for $7800, or go the SSD route for about $9800. Soon, hopefully soon it will be cheaper to go SSD for my needs.
 
The MX300 2TB is coming out of testing tomorrow morning. It will be interesting to see it compares to other products shipping today.

As always, thanks for reading and the comments.
 

Well, all of the M.2 I am considering are all NVMe 😉

I would love to see nvDIMM tech like 3D x point, or HMC to come to the consumer space, but I am pretty sure it won't be coming in any useful way for another 5+ years. In the short term is it just a server tech. Once they get the price down I think we will see 32-64GB dimms for use in consumer PCs to replace both RAM and SSDs, but it will be a cheaper version that is only a bit faster than SSDs. To get this tech cheap enough for consumer use, and large enough to replace SSDs in the enthusiast market (250+GB) I think we will have a very long wait.
 
Good grief... talk about fast technical evolution. Now I have to start figuring out what to do with my existing SSDs. I have the need for speed and space. Free coasters? Again?
 
Where are all of the 3D NAND MLC drives? I see everyone paddling the TLC, but isn't only Samsung selling the 3D MLC in their PRO lineup?
 
Outside of a few corner cases, MLC for the consumer is dead. Several companies have said it behind closed doors. I'm not ready to buy a TLC drive other than an 850 EVO and I know many of you feel the same way.
 
The low random read performance of the MX300 at queue depth 1 (compared to the 850 EVO) cannot be due to the number of channels or the number of dies. In that benchmark the SSD is only performing one read at a time. When the 750GB version of the MX300 was released, I was thinking that the difference was in the speed of the flash. But with the newer firmware tested in this review, the MX300 does quite well in some of the other benchmarks, so I'm now guessing that Micron's flash is as fast as Samsung's.

If it's not the flash, the only other alternative I can see is controller overhead. The difference between 7620 IOPS (the MX300) and 10855 IOPS (the 850 EVO) is 39 microseconds per operation. I can believe that the Marvell controller is slower than Samsung's controller, but an additional 39 microseconds per read operation is a lot of time.
 
For all the benchmarks included in articles like this, random read perf at low queue depths is the main stat that users actually feel. For everything else, OS-level prefetching, caching, and write buffering do a good job of hiding the performance of the underlying storage from end users.

Obviously, sequential read/write matters, but is often interface-constrained.
 
Sequential read performance chart 2 (the bar chart) is an example of misleading statistics: the top bar is more than twice as long as the bottom bar, although the real difference between them is around 15%,
 
Yeah, I noticed that. Well, the axis is labelled, so it's not that bad.

I think they were trying to illuminate the differences - not skew the article one way or another. Because all of the drives are near the interface speed, they're all pretty similar in this benchmark.
 
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