back to article Business or pleasure? Crucial MX200 and BX100 1TB SSDs

It’s not often you get an SSD manufacturer launching two new families of drives at the same time, but Crucial is back from kicking the sand into the faces of its competitors with its aggressive pricing policy of the MX100 series. This time it's flexing its muscles with the BX100 and MX200 ranges. Crucial BX100 SSD Budget 1TB …

  1. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

    Very interesting

    In solar imaging I am SERIOUSLY limited by the HDD I/O speed, with a camera spitting out 1936x1216 16bit grey level images at a rate of 128FPS. I easily gather 60-80 GB per sunny day, so speed and endurance figures like this are comforting

    1. fnj

      Re: Very interesting

      80 GB per 12 hours is only 2 MB per second. On the face of it that wouldn't even begin to strain the slowest HD or SSD you could find, unless your data is EXTREMELY peaky/bursty.

      1. sabroni Silver badge

        Re: Very interesting

        I reckon 1936x1216 16bit grey level images at a rate of 128FPS is 602MB a second (if each pixel is a 16 bit value it's 1936 x 1216 x 2 x 128 = 602669056 bytes). How's that in terms of HD or SSD speed?

        1. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

          Re: Very interesting

          Yes it is the extreme bursty nature of the data. I take mosaic shots like this twenty-three paner (do click on the image to see the full 3541x3451 res ;-)) and there is nothing more frustrating than to see the HDD suddenly throttle your speed from 100FPS to 4 or 5FPS just as cloud is approaching and you want to catch just one more pane. No doubt if acquisition was faster, I would catch more than "just" 80 GB per session.

  2. fnj

    How about the part that matters?

    I couldn't care less about the transfer speed. The slowest SSDs from yesteryear are more than fast enough - as long as they hold up in use (I'm looking at you, Samsung, the transfer speed collapsing to cripplingly slow after a while in use).

    No, what matters is power-loss data protection. Both internal table structures protection, and cached write data protection. If it doesn't have it, it is UTTER CRAP and I wouldn't touch it. I see no information presented here that either level of protection is present.

    Anandtech found that the M500, M550 and MX100 do not have the cached write data protection at all. What they have is a measure of protection against corruption of internal table structures - i.e., a half-assed level of protection; better than none but still FAIL.

    I am worried that the BX100 and/or MX200 might not have even the half-assed protection - that they are no better than ticking time bombs.

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/8528/micron-m600-128gb-256gb-1tb-ssd-review-nda-placeholder

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/7947/micron-m500-dc-480gb-800gb-review

    Note that the large expensive tantalum capacitors of the M500DC enterprise drive give real full protection. The wimpy teeny tiny ceramics on the M500 do not. And most other brands are not even THAT good.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How about the part that matters?

      If you are concerned about cached data being lost, check/fix your OS to be sure that writes are not reported as complete when written to cache, but have to be written to media. Not sure how to do that on Windows, but it is simple to do for Linux.

      Most people don't consider that to be a problem, the real issue with drives without power loss protection is that the internal FTL tables can become corrupted if the power fails at the wrong time, which loses all your data. The MX200 (and MX100) prevents that. Yes, you lose data in the cache when power fails, but after a file system check you're fine. If you think such data loss is bad, consider that this is also the case WITH EVERY HARD DRIVE EVER MADE. That's why servers require data to be written to the media, or use hardware (arrays, etc.) with NVRAM flash.

    2. Gordon 10
      FAIL

      Re: How about the part that matters?

      Im sorry how is powerloss protection even a high priority if 99% of the uses are laptop drives?

      I think you are confusing an enterprise requirement with a consumer one.

      1. Captain Scarlet
        Trollface

        Re: How about the part that matters?

        What if the sellotape fails to hold the battery in (Because the majority of home users I see drop their machines and the battery bay tends to be something where cheap plastic clips break easily)?

      2. Ryan Kendall

        Re: How about the part that matters?

        99% ?

        I use multiple crucial drives for my desktop. It is not got a ups back power loss protection is the difference between a just PC powering off and turning it back on again to a full OS re-install after drive corruption.

    3. tacitust

      Re: How about the part that matters?

      "If it doesn't have it, it is UTTER CRAP"

      I love it when people make these emotional, nonsensical claims. It's as though they know better than the entire Crucial research and development, who have been working on the product for years...

  3. jason 7

    I bought a BX100 250GB for a customer.

    My review?

    Well in real life it works as well as any of the other 40+ SSDs I've bought over the past three years or so.

    That's it really.

  4. chris 143

    micron m600s

    The almost identical micron m600s are definitely worth looking at generally cost a couple of percent more for much higher endurance figures.

  5. Bob Ajob
    FAIL

    What about reliability - failure rates versus warranty?

    Up until the last couple of years my biggest issue with SSDs for business and personal use has been trust in the various manufacturers in terms of the reliability of the drives and firmwares and the graceful/total failure rates. I have now used at least a handful of different SSD manufacturers with varying experiences in terms of device reliability, the only two failures I have had were performance dropping through the floor requiring a low level wipe (my fault for not leaving enough slack space in a bad RAID 0 setup) and a total device death where the BIOS on two machines could see the disk but flatly refused to start it or so any data (seemed it just locked up completely not just going read-only mode as designed).

    Most people accept that SATA3 SSDs perform way better than spinning rust (especially 5400rpm drives common in laptops which often have UPS in the form of battery back up) and can transfer large files at quite acceptable archive/backup rates of over 100MB/sec to cheap spinning rust. The most common every day business use case improvement for me is the reduction in boot times from a few minutes down to a few seconds. A few minutes saved at the start of each work day adds up to a lot of additional productivity (or longer snooze in bed!) but the other reason I just put a nice £100 SSD (250GB Sandisk) in my works laptop even at my own expense is the massive 10 year manufacturers warranty. There is no way I'll average anything like 40GB/day of writes, maybe a week but that should guarantee that by the time I get a new laptop (usually once every 5 years or so) then decrypting, backing up, cloning and restoring the whole 250GB disk image should take a few hours instead of all weekend.

    Key question - how often do you back up your SSD data to spinning rust and do the restore times improve so much that reliability becomes less relevant anyway, as effectively the SSD makes for an expensive but still disposable/consumable commodity item? As long as your recovery time objectives are met does it matter if you have to swap the disks out more or less often?

    1. jason 7

      Re: What about reliability - failure rates versus warranty?

      I think you are just over-thinking it all chap.

      Most people just get on using their SSD and if they feel the need, run a daily or weekly backup to a NAS, external USB HDD or Cloud.

      SSD/HDD failure comes under the term of "Worry about when it happens!"

  6. The Quiet One

    Never again......

    After the living hell of replacing hundreds of Crucial M4 SSD's when their crap Firmware started goosing drives (The 'Fixed' firmware did not supporting UEFI), I will never again buy another Crucial product.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Never again......

      Crucial also have a habit of describing firmware updates as 'optional' that actually contain important fixes for show-stopper bugs.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    New Enduarance ratings

    Are the new endurance ratings simply a result of being less conservative, better NAND, and maybe a dose of better cacheing with the onboard dram , and maybe reading that test of SSDs that showed they were good for PETAbytes of writes.

    I'm still happily using a refurbed OCZ 100Gb SSD ... life on the edge!

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