Crucial adds some new cheaper options to its SSD range with the BX100
There are two battles going on in the world of the SSD; one is for ultimate speeds, and the other is for enhanced value.
Crucial's new BX100 range is certainly tilting at the latter, though it's hardly what you might call pedestrian from a performance perspective.
The BX100 comes in four sizes, ranging from the modest 120GB, through 250GB to the larger 500GB and the monster 1TB model reviewed here.
Which you choose will not only impact on the capacity you get but also the performance levels you might expect. The slowest is the 120GB model, which only achieves 185MB/S writing, and then they get progressively quicker as the devices scale.
The top two drives have identical performance specs, so what I say for the 1TB is also applicable to the 500GB model. Having these discrepancies does make for a buyer beware scenario, but it's an inherent side effect of how the flash dies are combined to build the SSD.
What's probably more important with the BX100 design is that all the drives manage a superb read speed of 535MB/S, or the technology ceiling as we've now come to expect under SATA-3.
Read performance aside on the smaller drives, most people buy these things for their system to boot rapidly and their games to load smartly. And this drive does that well at every price, irrespective of the capacity.
The controller used here is the Silicon Motion SM2246EN, the same one that appeared in the Corsair Force LX series last year, if memory serves. But what struck me was that with very similar hardware the BX100 is about 20% quicker at writing, presumably because Crucial did something clever with it.
As a result, the 500GB and 1TB drives are not only maxing out SATA for reads, but they're also knocking on the writing limits door too. My benchmarks revealed that the 1TB drive exceeds the quoted write speed by about lOMB/s and is almost exactly true for the read performance.
With a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 1.5 million hours and 72TB TBW it should also be more reliable than a hard drive over the three-year warranty period.
But the killer aspect here is the price, being roughly 30p per GB across the range. So would I buy this 1TB drive for just north of £300? No, oddly. As the price is almost identical, I'd buy two 500GB BX100 drives, and then RAID 0 them for some utterly ridiculous performance with the same capacity.
If we suspected that the era of high-cost performance SSDs was over, the BX100 proves it categorically. Mark Pickavance
A performance and price combination that is hard to ignore.