Introduction

Crucial, a subsidiary of Micron, a world leader in memory and flash production, brought us such wonderful SSDs as the BX100 and MX100, which also came at an aggressive price point.

Today, we are reviewing the Crucial BX200 SSD with an even lower price point than the BX100. It use a slightly newer Silicon Motion SM2256EN controller, as opposed to the SM2246EN which was introduced with the BX100. The big change here is the switch to Micron's new triple-layer-cell (TLC) flash, which is more cost effective because it can store more data per cell, although at less performance.

In order to boost TLC chip performance to make up for the ground lost over MLC, Crucial allocated a small amount of memory (6 GB on their 480 GB model) as SLC cache, which writes a bit to each TLC cell, instead of three. While much faster, such a setup is basically a speed vs. size tradeoff.

The BX200 comes in capacities of 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB - a 120 GB model is missing.