Crucial MX200 1TB and 500GB SSD Reviews: Affordable And Fast


Test Setup, IOMeter 1.1 RC

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled. The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing, and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System
Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

Processor
-

Motherboard -


Video Card -

Memory -

Audio -

Storage -

 

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7-4790K

MSI Z97 Gaming 7
(Z97 Chipset, AHCI Enabled)

Intel HD 4600

8GB G.SKILL DDR3-1600

Integrated on board

Corsair Force GT (OS Drive)
Crucial MX200 (500GB)
Crucial MX200 (1TB)
Samsung SSD 850 Pro (1TB)
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 2.5" (500GB)
OCZ Vector 180 (480GB)
Crucial M550 (512GB)

OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -
Video Drivers
-





Relevant Software:
Windows 8.1 Pro x64
Intel 10.0.26, iRST 13.6.0.1002
DirectX 11
Intel HD 10.18.10.33

Benchmarks Used:
IOMeter 1.1.0 RC
HD Tune v5.50
ATTO v2.47
AS SSD
CrystalDiskMark v3.0.3 x64
PCMark 7
SiSoftware Sandra 2014
IOMeter
I/O Subsystem Measurement Tool

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance for the average end user. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput within a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; our custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (34% writes) and 100% random access.

Crucial MX200 IOMeter 4K

Crucial MX200 IOMeter 8K

Crucial's 1TB MX200 SSD is a bit faster than the 512GB model, both of which were able to outpace Crucial's M550 in 512GB form. However, they fell below higher end options from Samsung and OCZ.

Crucial MX200 IOMeter QD32
 


Once again, the MX200 drives post solid numbers on their own and are a step faster than the M550, but trail the rest of the pack by around 40MB/s to 50MB/s.


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