Crucial replaces the BX100 with a drive that is remarkable value for money
The BX200 is a very significant product, and perversely that is nothing to do with the technology or design work that Crucial put into it.
That might seem an odd thing to say, even for this writer, but the BX200 has special significance because of where it comes in the transition between conventional drive technology and solid-state drives.
But before I get to that, what does a little under £120 buy you in solid-state storage? On the outside the BX200 is pretty much indistinguishable from all the silver 2.5" SSDs that Crucial has made over the past few years. Its 7mm thick, comes with a spacer to make it fit in a 9.5mm hole and uses standard SATA power and data connectors.
Being the replacement for the BX100 launched a year ago, the design is meant to offer an affordable entry point for those wishing to join the SSD generation. To help with that Crucial includes in the box links to where you can find a system migration software tool and a licence key for you to use it.
Once you've connected it to your PC, you can either fresh install onto the drive or use the migration tool to move your existing system on to the BX200.
Crucial's quoted sequential read/write performance here is 540MB/s and 490MB/s respectively, and in testing I actually got it to go a little quicker than that.
That's great read speed, reading almost as quick as the SATA-3 interface will realistically go, and the write speed isn't disappointing either.
Where it’s less impressive is in the IOPS department, but unless you're running your own datacentre, that's less of a problem.
These numbers, however, do put Crucial in a corner somewhat, from a product separation viewpoint, because they're very close in read and write speed to the MX100 premium product range. Therefore it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the next generation MX range needs to widen that gap again, to justify costing more. And it could do that, if it was technically possible, but it isn't, because SATA-3 has hit the bandwidth buffers.
To be much better than the BX200, any new drive will need to use either SATA 3.2, or exclusively M.2 PCIe. And as most users don't have access to either of those interfaces, that could be a big problem for both Crucial and all those making SSD technology in general.
As for the BX200, it's fast, affordable and comes in capacity sizes that people will like. I'm expecting it to sell well to those who want to swap out their hard drive for flash technology and have the change be relatively painless.
There's a 240GB model for £65.99 and a 960GB option for £233.99, and unlike SSDs of old, they all perform much the same irrespective of size.
The significance of the BX200 is that it marks the point at which the SATA SSD is truly cost effective for most PC owners and exploits the SATA interface almost to the hilt. The only directions from here are different interfaces or much larger capacities going forward. Get them while they're hot, I say. Mark Pickavance
Fast and affordable SATA SSD.