Crucial BX300 3D MLC SSD Review: Affordable, Durable, Solid State Storage
Introducing The Crucial BX300 SSD
Crucial recently launched a new series of solid state drives that somewhat defy convention. While a number of other recent releases feature various flavors of TLC NAND, the Crucial BX300 series we’ll be showing you here actually features 3D MLC NAND flash memory. In the current SSD landscape, MLC NAND isn’t typically used for consumer-class SSDs any longer, especially in lower-priced offerings, but Crucial is bucking the trend this time around.
The Crucial BX300 series also tops out at a relatively small 480GB capacity. For an affordable boot drive, that’s still plenty of storage for most people, but it’s a far cry from the 1TB – 2TB of other series of SATA SSDs.
The full specs for the initial family of Crucial BX300 drives is listed below. Take a quick look to see where the drive’s stand, then we’ll pull one apart, poke around inside, and take it for a spin through an array of benchmarks...
Opening the Crucial BX300’s enclosure reveals that the drives are built around a SMI SM2258 four-channel controller, which has been used by a variety of other SSD manufacturers as well.
This particular drive is a 240GB model, and as you can see, the PCB is outfitted with 8 pieces of NAND flash memory and a bit of DRAM cache to complement that SMI SM2258.
The Crucial BX300 series of drives are rated for 555MB/s sequential reads and up to 510MB/s. Random write IOPS are rated at 90K for all of the drives in the family as well, but random reads vary from 45K all the way on up to 90K, depending in the capacity.
All of the drives support technologies like SMART and TRIM, and offer SLC write acceleration. In addition, Crucial’s firmware supports active garbage collection and a multi-step data integrity algorithm to minimize or eliminate lost data beyond page, block, and die-level failures, and ensure long-term data integrity.
The drives carry a 3-year warranty and are rated for 55TB – 160TB total bytes written (TBW), which equates to 30GB – 88GB written per day for 5 years, depending on the capacity of the drives.
Included with all Crucial BX300 series drives is a 7mm-to-9mm adapter, a basic lit pack, and a key for Acronis True Image HD software, to help with data migration for users upgrading an existing system to an SSD.
The Crucial BX300 series also tops out at a relatively small 480GB capacity. For an affordable boot drive, that’s still plenty of storage for most people, but it’s a far cry from the 1TB – 2TB of other series of SATA SSDs.
The full specs for the initial family of Crucial BX300 drives is listed below. Take a quick look to see where the drive’s stand, then we’ll pull one apart, poke around inside, and take it for a spin through an array of benchmarks...
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Opening the Crucial BX300’s enclosure reveals that the drives are built around a SMI SM2258 four-channel controller, which has been used by a variety of other SSD manufacturers as well.
