An old-school SATA drive in a PCI Express world
These are exciting times in data storage. That's right, storage is exciting. For proof, observe exhibit A, namely the introduction of much faster PCI Express interfaces for PC hard drives. Exhibit B involves radical new memory technologies, such as Intel and Micron's 3D XPoint. Case closed?
Certainly, the overall upshot is that storage is moving from what you might call the megabyte era into the gigabyte era, in terms of bandwidth or data shunted every second. In that context, what to make of a new SSD from Crucial (the retail front of the aforementioned Micron), which is based on the ancient SATA interface, and looks decidedly non-exotic on paper?
Luckily for Crucial, there's a counter argument to all of the above, and it involves diminishing returns. Rig up two otherwise identical PCs, one with a conventional but best-of-breed SATA SSD, and one with a newfangled PCI Express puppy, and it's usually difficult to pick them apart subjectively. The SATA system feels pretty much as snappy. Ultimately, isn't that what counts? How your PC feels, as opposed to somewhat arbitrary benchmark numbers?
A lot of the time, yes, even if there are heavy duty applications such as high-end image-editing that sometimes provide greater contrast. Anyway, the point is that if the new Crucial BX200, seen here in 960GB specification, is a solid SATA SSD, it's going to be good enough for most of us most of the time. Factor in the competitive pricing, and the appeal of a near 1TB solidstate drive is obvious enough.
It doesn't hurt that Crucial's Storage Executive SSD management software is so slick. It runs in a browser, has a clean and intuitive interface, and gives quick and easy access to features such as firmware updates (neither data destructive nor requiring a reboot) and resetting the drive to factory state. The last point being particularly handy if one of your work colleagues has set the thing up with some very odd partitioning that you can’t easily undo within Windows. Naming no names.
The problem, however, is that this isn't a terribly good SATA SSD. You wouldn't necessarily spot that from most of the benchmarks. The headline results from ATTO and AS SSD look decent enough. However, and as a for instance, the detailed ATTO results show some fairly dramatic inconsistencies. Some test results are great, others significantly less so.
More relevant are the real-world file compression and copy benchmarks, that show the BX200 miles off the pace of the opposition. And remember, that opposition is conventional SATA drives. A good PCI Express drive would tear the BX200 a new one. Indeed, during our pre-benchmark setup procedure, the BX200 just felt slow.
So while we could drill down into details such as the BX200's Silicon Motion SM2256 controller chipset or its triple-level TLC memory cells, contrast them with the Marvell 88SS9189 controller and MLC NAND in Crucial's quicker MX200, and discuss how it feeds into the disappointing performance, it's probably futile.
Instead, better to invoke the sister cliché to the diminishing returns spiel we trotted out earlier. Yup, it's ye olde false economy. The BX200 is cheaper than many similarly sized SATA SSDs, including Crucial's own MX200, but you'll end up wishing you'd spent that little bit more. Jeremy Laird
SPECIFICATIONS
Capacity 960GB
Chipset Silicon Motion SM2256
Memory Micron 16nm TLC NAND
Sequential 540MB/s read, 490MB/s write
IOPS 66k read, 78k write
Warranty Three years