# Another "affordable" 2TB SSD (Crucial MX300)



## RejZoR (Nov 14, 2016)

*Crucial MX300 2TB*
http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/ct2050mx300ssd1

Posting this because I know how poor selection of 2TB drives there is. Checking tests, it's quite a lot slower than Samsung 850 Pro or Evo, but also costs another 100€ less. It's still SSD, so it'll be way faster than HDD and is made by Crucial which has been very reliable so far. This one also comes with 3D NAND, rated at 400 TBW. And for 500€, it's not that bad of an option actually.


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## rtwjunkie (Nov 14, 2016)

Thanks!  SSD differences between each other are minute, mostly identifiable by benchmarks.  They all slam HDD's in performance.

Crucial brand has been reliable, and fairly affordable, and so has been my go-to.


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## hat (Nov 14, 2016)

Well, it's good to see them coming down, but it's still extremely cost-prohibitive. I can't imagine anybody who would need that much SSD storage space at that price. I stupidly paid over $300 for my 512GB SSD after working much overtime for games... and the difference was... I couldn't even tell, heh.


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## xkm1948 (Nov 14, 2016)

One of my new lab PC has those Seagate SSHD, I must say I am surprised those little 2TB SSHD performs way over my expectations. Booting up to Windows 10 is pretty fast, loading regular applications is fast as well.


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## newtekie1 (Nov 14, 2016)

hat said:


> Well, it's good to see them coming down, but it's still extremely cost-prohibitive. I can't imagine anybody who would need that much SSD storage space at that price. I stupidly paid over $300 for my 512GB SSD after working much overtime for games... and the difference was... I couldn't even tell, heh.



This 2GB is _only_ $500.  I can see someone wanting this if they had a laptop that only had space for a single drive, but that's about it.


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## AsRock (Nov 14, 2016)

Gotta love how people and company use the word ONLY.


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## RejZoR (Nov 15, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> This 2GB is _only_ $500.  I can see someone wanting this if they had a laptop that only had space for a single drive, but that's about it.



Or if you want to simply use SSD only even if you have a rack for 5 drives. I've tossed out 2TB HDD and replaced it with 2TB SSD. People don't realize how liberating it is once you go full SSD and throw all the spinning stuff away. Tablet, SSD, laptop, SSD, desktop, SSD. No more grinding, scrubbing and buzzing. And it's speedy. What surprises me is why people still do silly small SSD + HDD nonsense. Just stick a slightly bigger SSD in there. You can still have external HDD for movies and stuff if that's an issue. It's useful anyway so you can just stick it on TV and watch them directly on TV. Or wherever you go.


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## Recon-UK (Nov 15, 2016)

Crucial are awesome, if it was not for the puny size of my M4 64GB i would still have it, i sold off my Sammy 850 Pro because it broke down but i managed to fix it again, so i'm on the hunt for a better SSD.

This might just be it!


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## RejZoR (Nov 15, 2016)

I still have a Crucial M4 128GB in my crappy AMD laptop (yeah, that E-450 one). With SSD it's at least functional. With HDD, I'd probably throw it out the window years ago.


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## rtwjunkie (Nov 15, 2016)

I'm still using M4 256GB in alternate rig.  Very standup SSD.


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## remixedcat (Nov 15, 2016)

I need at least 500GB SSD for 120 or less and it's hard but I found a 250GB one on amazon (samsung 850EVO) for 85USD... ugh I'd be going over budget for 500 GB from them how are Crucial's SSDs in general since I've found some within that price range and do they use those dreaded chipsets?


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## RejZoR (Nov 15, 2016)

Why people confine them within budget when it comes to storage devices? These aren't graphic cards that become outdated after 2-3 years. SSD's, if you buy big enough will last you for years and years. And speed wise, nothing will change on SATA either. It's why I've tossed 800€ in top of the line 2TB SSD. Sure, it's still a lot of money, but knowing I'll have it till it dies (most likely and it has 10 years warranty) it's easy to justify such price. If I had to sell it after 2-3 years for less than half the price, then I'd also have a problem. What is 40 USD more? It's nothing if it'll serve you great for ages. Not to mention you'll be getting twice the capacity for 1/3 higher price. Go with 500GB. If this will be your only drive, you totally won't regret it.

Btw, Crucial MX300 525GB goes for 120€ on Geizhals. So, that's 120 USD by trade laws...


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## remixedcat (Nov 15, 2016)

Because people got other stuff they need to spend their money on.... I have a 250USD xmas budget and I need to get both an OS SSD and a storage HDD. That's all I'll be able to afford to get for x-mas. It's something I really need as well.


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## RejZoR (Nov 15, 2016)

SSD for OS is like throwing money out the window. Pointless. For what? Faster Windows boot? And the rest you'll fetch data from slow crap HDD.
If you go down that route, go with SSHD. At least dynamic SSD cache will cache what's used often, providing boost across the HDD and not just what you install on SSD. Been there, seen that, gone full SSD. Otherwise I'd stay with PrimoCache combo of SSD and HDD. I suggest you do the same.


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## Komshija (Nov 18, 2016)

500$ is still too much for an SSD.


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## RejZoR (Nov 18, 2016)

But $500 for a graphic card that will be obsolete in 2 years time, isn't? SSD won't be obsolete since 2TB is plenty even for more demanding users even for years to come. It's why I could justify even 800€ for mine...


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## silentbogo (Nov 18, 2016)

remixedcat said:


> I need at least 500GB SSD for 120 or less and it's hard but I found a 250GB one on amazon (samsung 850EVO) for 85USD... ugh I'd be going over budget for 500 GB from them how are Crucial's SSDs in general since I've found some within that price range and do they use those dreaded chipsets?


Tons of options for your budget.
If you can stretch it to $130-$140, then you can get a new 512GB Sandisk X400, AData SP550 or 500GB Mushkin Triactor. 
Otherwise, an older Sandisk SSD Plus / Ultra II, or look for Kingston drives on sale - those can be purchased for $100 or sometimes even less (just beware of knockoffs).

Alternatively - a pair of 256GB SSDs in RAID-0. Same price, but better performance (+slight headache ).

I am not all that concerned about the amount of storage I have, so I migrated to all-SSD setup almost a year ago(128GB NVMe, 240GB for Steam/Games, and 512GB storage). 

$500 is not bad for a 2TB drive, but I still think that it will be wise to wait until next year to buy one. Almost all major manufacturers have presented newer/denser NAND chips this year, which means that soon we might get even cheaper 1TB+ SSDs.


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## yotano211 (Nov 18, 2016)

I thought some company was doing a 4tb SSD for $500 bucks. I thought it heard from it CES in 2016. Wonder what ever happen to that.


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## RejZoR (Nov 18, 2016)

Dream on. 4TB SSD for $500 is unlikely because it just doesn't compute. Making 1-2TB cheaper, that makes whole lot of sense because this is what's a direct replacement for current HDD's that most people have. 4TB is exotic even for regular HDD's even today. I was perfectly happy with 2TB capacity of my former HDD so I've decided to go with 2TB SSD as well. It shoud serve me great for years capacity wise. I might at one point replace my external 2TB USB drive with 4TB or more for movies and bulk stuff, but for countless games, 2TB is huge capacity.

4TB for around $800 I can somehow see if you really go budget on components, but something properly capable, nah, I don't think so.


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## remixedcat (Nov 19, 2016)

Adata is shit thier USB drives are slow and flimsy... I will prolly get intel or samsung


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## newtekie1 (Nov 19, 2016)

remixedcat said:


> Adata is shit thier USB drives are slow and flimsy... I will prolly get intel or samsung



500GB Class PNY $105 on newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820178968

500GB Class Kingston $108:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820242259

OCZ Trion for $116:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820228143

Heck, the MX300 is normally $119, and has been going on sale for $105-109:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820156151

All good drives, and the MX300 is a really good drive, with some features you only find on really high end and enterprise drives(like power loss protection).  So it really isn't that hard to find 500GB drives for $120 or less.  In fact, I'd call $100-120 the sweet spot for 500GB drives.


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## Komshija (Nov 21, 2016)

RejZoR said:


> *But $500 for a graphic card* that will be obsolete in 2 years time, isn't? SSD won't be obsolete since 2TB is plenty even for more demanding users even for years to come. It's why I could justify even 800€ for mine...


Sure it is. Usually 500$ GPU will be able to push all games on max settings for the next 4-5 years. It's not that I would give over 350€ for a GPU, but some people will without a second thought. For 500$ you can buy fast 4TB HDD and 1TB SSD and you'll still have some extra money for beer with friends, which is a lot better solution.


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## R-T-B (Nov 21, 2016)

> Sure it is. Usually 500$ GPU will be able to push all games on max settings for the next 4-5 years.



Unless your playing on simple 1080p, nope.


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## Komshija (Nov 21, 2016)

R-T-B said:


> Unless your playing on simple 1080p, nope.


 "Simple 1080p". That made my day.  OT:Good observation, I was referring primarily to 1080p monitors. They are currently dominant, while 1440p and 4K monitors are in the minority.  I doubt that 4K monitors will have dominant market position for the next 4-5 years. Current 500$ GPU (that would be 2 x RX 480 8GB or higher factory clocked GTX1070) should push all future games on max settings even on 1440p (standard 16:9 format) monitors, just like HD 7970 can max out all current games on 1080p.


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## R-T-B (Nov 21, 2016)

> They are currently dominant, while 1440p and 4K monitors are in the minority.



Not so much with people who spend $500 on graphics, I assure you.

I know because I'm like the one person with a $500 graphics card on 1080p in this whole forum.


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## jboydgolfer (Nov 21, 2016)

theone said:


> `


 im too cheap to buy a GPU that Pricey


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## R-T-B (Nov 21, 2016)

jboydgolfer said:


> im too cheap to buy a GPU that Pricey



I know.  It's special being me, I assure you.


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## Komshija (Nov 21, 2016)

^^ Most people who will get a 500$ GPU or a 500$ SSD will have at least 2000$ worth PC. On the other hand, most people will not give over 200$ for a GPU.


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## Ungari (Nov 21, 2016)

hat said:


> Well, it's good to see them coming down, but it's still extremely cost-prohibitive. I can't imagine anybody who would need that much SSD storage space at that price. I stupidly paid over $300 for my 512GB SSD after working much overtime for games... and the difference was... I couldn't even tell, heh.



People who are running older and less powerful CPUs will see a performance increase with SSDs when system RAM is exceeded due to poor memory management.


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## Aquinus (Nov 21, 2016)

You know, people don't know what they're missing until they have it. I just switched jobs and my new workstation has a Acer S277HK and it's pretty awesome. It makes want one at home.


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## RejZoR (Nov 21, 2016)

We used to have garbage workstations with Pentium 4, 512MB RAM and slow ass HDD's. I was clever and had one broken workstation so I forked another 512MB RAM stick from it. Now we have quad cores with 4GB RAM and SSD. It's like day and night.


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## Filip Georgievski (Nov 21, 2016)

In my opinion, SSDs are faster and deliver more performance, but HDDs are more reliable.
I have 2 external HDDs ( 1 for movies on TV - 500GB Samsung 2.5 inch, and 1 HDD on PC - 640GB WD Green 6 years old in a D3 Samsung Docking Station which i use for game instals and some usefull stuff like drivers for my PCs and laptop and Windows installs).
In my PC i have a 120GB Kingston V300 ( OS, Drivers and Programs) and a 1TB WD Blue for Games and Storage.
SSD + HDD is the best bang for buck storage solutuon yet for me.


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## rtwjunkie (Nov 21, 2016)

R-T-B said:


> Not so much with people who spend $500 on graphics, I assure you.
> 
> I know because I'm like the one person with a $500 graphics card on 1080p in this whole forum.



Nope, me too.  There are quite a few, because even "simple" 1080p can be more than many GPU's can reliably handle all the time.


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## R-T-B (Nov 21, 2016)

rtwjunkie said:


> Nope, me too.  There are quite a few, because even "simple" 1080p can be more than many GPU's can reliably handle all the time.



Thanks.  Now I don't feel special.


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## Vayra86 (Nov 21, 2016)

Honestly this MX300 is one of the most interesting SSD's on the consumer tier right now.

Price/GB is getting a serious drop from one of the most notable SSD companies, this is an example others will be forced to follow. The good name of the MX line is in the consumer's advantage even though its performance is lower than the previous drives.. For example, you can be dead sure Samsung is going to want to position something at the same level, and at least similar performance because that's what is selling their EVO's right now (similar price, better perf - even though nobody could ever notice the difference in perf).

FWIW the only SSD's I would ever consider are Intel, Samsung and Crucial. All the rest have had extremely questionable SSD's in the past and are not stellar in any way, neither endurance nor performance nor Price/GB.

This hasn't changed.

About SSHD, this is usually a form of SSD caching, and will only be close to SSD responsiveness when stuff is actually cached - that is - frequently used. Great for applications, worthless for data, and performance can be all over the place and differ completely per use case and even application. That being said, I also *feel* it is the least reliable drive you can get because it requires more parts, and each part can fail. It's cost effective and that is about all you can say of it.


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## RealNeil (Nov 21, 2016)

I've recently purchased a few M.2 256GB Crucial drives that were refurbished. I got two of them for $64.00 shipped.

Shop around. You'll find deals if you keep looking.


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## yotano211 (Nov 22, 2016)

RejZoR said:


> Dream on. 4TB SSD for $500 is unlikely because it just doesn't compute. Making 1-2TB cheaper, that makes whole lot of sense because this is what's a direct replacement for current HDD's that most people have. 4TB is exotic even for regular HDD's even today. I was perfectly happy with 2TB capacity of my former HDD so I've decided to go with 2TB SSD as well. It shoud serve me great for years capacity wise. I might at one point replace my external 2TB USB drive with 4TB or more for movies and bulk stuff, but for countless games, 2TB is huge capacity.
> 
> 4TB for around $800 I can somehow see if you really go budget on components, but something properly capable, nah, I don't think so.



This is what I saw at CES 2016 when I was there and heard it on tech sites some days later. 

https://www.techpowerup.com/219116/mushkin-shows-off-a-500-dollar-4-tb-ssd



RealNeil said:


> I've recently purchased a few M.2 256GB Crucial drives that were refurbished. I got two of them for $64.00 shipped.
> 
> Shop around. You'll find deals if you keep looking.


I just picked up a 500gb m.2 evo 850 for 109 on Amazon. They are 119.


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## RealNeil (Nov 22, 2016)

I bought two 500GB Crucial M.2 drives about 6 months ago and they were $150+ each, so $109 is a good price.
But two 256GB M.2 drives for $32.00 each was fantastic.


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## RejZoR (Nov 22, 2016)

If history though me anything, SSD's with internal RAID were never any good...


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## newtekie1 (Nov 22, 2016)

RejZoR said:


> If history though me anything, SSD's with internal RAID were never any good...



Practically all SSDs use internal RAID...


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## hat (Nov 22, 2016)

Ungari said:


> People who are running older and less powerful CPUs will see a performance increase with SSDs when system RAM is exceeded due to poor memory management.


Okay, but who's buying a 2TB SSD while they have crap CPU and RAM? I'd pay the $40 or so for a 128GB SSD in an older/slower system, but $500 for 2TB? Nope.


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## Ithanul (Nov 22, 2016)

Crucial do make some nice drives.  Good to see SSD growing in size.

Still rocking a old M4 512GB that I nabbed in a sale many years ago, but I am still not paying that much for large SSD considering for a price like that you can nab several 2-3TB HDDs.


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## JunkBear (Nov 22, 2016)

In term of overall everyday read-write performance what is better between a ssd or à Western Digital Black 64megs cache 7200rpm?


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## RejZoR (Nov 22, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> Practically all SSDs use internal RAID...



No they don't. One thing is controller communicating with individual NAND chips (your "RAID") and another where you have 2 controllers that are paired with internal RAID to work as ONE controller and then presented to the system as 1x SSD drive. That has never worked well and personally I'd stay the hell away from such drives, especially when you're aiming at huge capacities like 2TB and beyond.


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## Ungari (Nov 22, 2016)

hat said:


> Okay, but who's buying a 2TB SSD while they have crap CPU and RAM? I'd pay the $40 or so for a 128GB SSD in an older/slower system, but $500 for 2TB? Nope.



2TB, no. But 256MB or 120MB, why not?


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## JunkBear (Nov 22, 2016)

Ungari said:


> 2TB, no. But 256MB or 120MB, why not?



GB you mean.  Nobody buy hdd with Megabytes anymore hehehe


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## newtekie1 (Nov 22, 2016)

RejZoR said:


> No they don't. One thing is controller communicating with individual NAND chips (your "RAID") and another where you have 2 controllers that are paired with internal RAID to work as ONE controller and then presented to the system as 1x SSD drive. That has never worked well and personally I'd stay the hell away from such drives, especially when you're aiming at huge capacities like 2TB and beyond.



That is two different implementation of RAID, but still RAID in both cases. You're talking about a nested RAID, and it used to be the only way to get a decently sized SSD.  And I don't even think there are that many of those around anymore, if any in the consumer market.  But all SSDs do use RAID.  The NAND chips are used in a RAID 0 configuration.  A single NAND chip is not fast enough to provide the sustained read/write speeds we see and expect from a SSD.  So the controller strips the data across multiple NAND chips.  This is RAID 0.  This is also why you'll pretty much never see a drive with a single NAND chip, even though we have NAND that is big enough at this point.  The 1TB MX300 uses 8 chips, so a single chip would be enough for a 120GB SSD.  But instead they would use multiple smaller chips, likely at least 4, to get the speed they need


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## peche (Nov 22, 2016)

great!, crucial drives are quite brave warriors, i still have my 64GB's SSD on my rig rocking the world, it also says 98% remaining life... since a year ago the same message, that little devil always blows my mind with the faster experience on the OS boot time and other apps loading time! 

regards,


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## RejZoR (Nov 22, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> That is two different implementation of RAID, but still RAID in both cases. You're talking about a nested RAID, and it used to be the only way to get a decently sized SSD.  And I don't even think there are that many of those around anymore, if any in the consumer market.  But all SSDs do use RAID.  The NAND chips are used in a RAID 0 configuration.  A single NAND chip is not fast enough to provide the sustained read/write speeds we see and expect from a SSD.  So the controller strips the data across multiple NAND chips.  This is RAID 0.  This is also why you'll pretty much never see a drive with a single NAND chip, even though we have NAND that is big enough at this point.  The 1TB MX300 uses 8 chips, so a single chip would be enough for a 120GB SSD.  But instead they would use multiple smaller chips, likely at least 4, to get the speed they need



Those are memory channels. Cheap controllers use fewer controller channels, that's why they have lower read and write capabilites (especially write).


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## newtekie1 (Nov 22, 2016)

RejZoR said:


> Those are memory channels. Cheap controllers use fewer controller channels, that's why they have lower read and write capabilites (especially write).



Memory channels refers to striping on volatile memory, RAID0 is striping on non-volatile memory.  Same basic concept.


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## RejZoR (Nov 22, 2016)

My point was that merging two separate controllers with "external" internal RAID was never good. And for that 4TB SSD for $500 they talk about this exact merging of two drives.

What's underneath single controller it's not even relevant. They are designed to perform TRIM correctly as well as all garbage collection and processing for maximum performance. Once you RAID several controllers, things get ugly most of the time.


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