Crucial Readies the MX300 Performance SSD

[btarunr]

Crucial is reportedly readying a successor to its best-selling MX200 performance-segment SSD. The new MX300, which will initially be launched in a 750 GB capacity (model: CT750MX300SSD1), will feature 3D (stacked) NAND flash memory. This particular model serves up sequential transfer speeds of up to 530 MB/s reads, with up to 510 MB/s writes. Looking at the way Crucial is pricing the drive in Japan (JPY ¥24,000), its stateside pre-tax MSRP could very well be sub-$200, working out to a price/GB of at most $0.26. According to the source, the drive could launch later today.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[natr0n]

I'm waiting on an rma of an mx100 lets hope they send this.

 

[xkm1948]

Love my MX200. Solid performance and great reliability.

 

[bogami]

Price declines ,nice since I last year in the shop bought 2x MX 512 at 400€ and now 750 GB will cost the same. But I can not overlook the lack of software RAID that is not in support. Caution when buying there.

 

[Kyrios74]

When I choose an ssd, I don't see immediately the speed. I'm interested in the technology used, the build quality and reliability. I do not think that 3D is better than MLC+SLC. It costs less to produce in 3D. I think I'll spend the next production, You might be called MX400.

 

[hojnikb]

>successor to its best-selling MX200 performance-segment SSD.
>3D TLC flash

Pick one. Also pretty odd capacity. Even though they are using 384Gbit dies, they should configure them to more common capacities like 480 and 960GB.

 

[RejZoR]

I don't understand why is everyone so slow at offering high capacity SSD's. 750GB. Sure it's alright, but c'mon, SSD's up to 1TB have been around for ages. Go beyond this point and all you have available are stupendously expensive PCIe card SSD's and Samsung 850 Pro/Evo up to 2TB flavor. And that's it. Are all the controllers so immature or primitive they can't hold up to such huge capacities or are vendors incapable of stacking up enough good quality NAND without costing a fortune?

I like Crucial, still have their M4 SSD in my old laptop, but they should really be a bit more competitive considering Micron makes NAND as well.

 

[Caring1]

Bigger, but not faster.

 

[bug]

I don't understand why is everyone so slow at offering high capacity SSD's. 750GB. Sure it's alright, but c'mon, SSD's up to 1TB have been around for ages. Go beyond this point and all you have available are stupendously expensive PCIe card SSD's and Samsung 850 Pro/Evo up to 2TB flavor. And that's it. Are all the controllers so immature or primitive they can't hold up to such huge capacities or are vendors incapable of stacking up enough good quality NAND without costing a fortune?

I like Crucial, still have their M4 SSD in my old laptop, but they should really be a bit more competitive considering Micron makes NAND as well.

Because the market for $200+ SSDs is rather limited maybe?
I'm tempted to get a couple of these and get rid of both mechanical drives I still have. But that would be about $400 and my video card is also in line for an upgrade this year.

 

[Parn]

Because of the "Drive cannot be found" error that plagued my MX100, I'm a little skeptical of buying another Crucial SSD again although the price if true is pretty attractive for 750GB drive.

 

[RejZoR]

Because the market for $200+ SSDs is rather limited maybe?
I'm tempted to get a couple of these and get rid of both mechanical drives I still have. But that would be about $400 and my video card is also in line for an upgrade this year.

People not willing to pay a bit more money for a speedy data storage that will serve them for ages, but they have no problems buying a graphic card for 400€ or even 600€ that will become outdated in 2 years. See why I don't understand certain things? Sure my 2TB SSD was a huge investment, but considering it won't become outdated for years to come, it's all of a sudden not as expensive anymore. Plus it's silent and cooler than HDD. I've always thought SATA3 speeds are not enough, but it's really IOPS that make all the difference. Because honestly, I can't notice a difference between current 850 Pro and SM951 M.2 AHCI that I had. Maybe in sequential scenarios, but for random access, can't really feel a difference.

Also, if this one will be a sub $200 drive and they can't fit enough NAND into 2.5" form factor, why the hell no one offers 3.5" SSD drives? All cases have slots for these anyway. Just cram 2x MX300 worth of NAND into a 3.5" case and call it a day. 1.5 TB for under 400€, I can see how more people would get these, even in 3.5" size, entirely ditching damn spinning drives.

 

[TheLostSwede]

£171 on Amazon UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01DUNLMUU/?tag=tec053-21

Under $200 in the US http://www.macmall.com/p/Crucial-Internal-Hard-Drives/product~dpno~40056923~pdp.bacjidjj

 

[hojnikb]

People not willing to pay a bit more money for a speedy data storage that will serve them for ages, but they have no problems buying a graphic card for 400€ or even 600€ that will become outdated in 2 years. See why I don't understand certain things? Sure my 2TB SSD was a huge investment, but considering it won't become outdated for years to come, it's all of a sudden not as expensive anymore. Plus it's silent and cooler than HDD. I've always thought SATA3 speeds are not enough, but it's really IOPS that make all the difference. Because honestly, I can't notice a difference between current 850 Pro and SM951 M.2 AHCI that I had. Maybe in sequential scenarios, but for random access, can't really feel a difference.

Also, if this one will be a sub $200 drive and they can't fit enough NAND into 2.5" form factor, why the hell no one offers 3.5" SSD drives? All cases have slots for these anyway. Just cram 2x MX300 worth of NAND into a 3.5" case and call it a day. 1.5 TB for under 400€, I can see how more people would get these, even in 3.5" size, entirely ditching damn spinning drives.

Things are not that simple. It's easy to slap around 2, 4 or even 8TB of flash (just stack 16 dies on top of each other) into 2.5" case, but issue is, that there is no market for such drives. Also controller support is pretty much non existent for anything larger than 2TB of flash.

Once flash prices go down even further and controller supports comes, than we'll see more 2TB and 4TB ssds (outside of samsung).

 

[RejZoR]

How do they know there is no market for it if they don't even offer them? Why has Samsung seen the market for up to 2TB drives, but no one else? If it was so unsustainable, Samsung would stop making them soon after release and focus on smaller ones, but they still churn them out from their factories. Because they apparently sell.

I think the real problem are SSD controllers. Most companies only support up to 1TB. And since only few make their own controllers, they all depend on those SSD controller makers. Where Samsung makes their own and so they could easily modify the controller and produce such drives on their own terms. Only one with such capability would be Toshiba since it now owns OCZ and their Barefoot controllers. They could do this, but for some reason they don't seem to be interested. Hm.

 

[bug]

People not willing to pay a bit more money for a speedy data storage that will serve them for ages, but they have no problems buying a graphic card for 400€ or even 600€ that will become outdated in 2 years.

Well, those "ages" translate into "3 years limited warranty" on the box. Sure, some (many) drives will last much longer than that, but if the manufacturer doesn't guarantee it, then it's not really a guaranteed investment for ages.
Unrelated, but the most iI have paid for a video card was almost $300. I always buy mid-range.

See why I don't understand certain things? Sure my 2TB SSD was a huge investment, but considering it won't become outdated for years to come, it's all of a sudden not as expensive anymore. Plus it's silent and cooler than HDD. I've always thought SATA3 speeds are not enough, but it's really IOPS that make all the difference. Because honestly, I can't notice a difference between current 850 Pro and SM951 M.2 AHCI that I had. Maybe in sequential scenarios, but for random access, can't really feel a difference.

No argument there.

Also, if this one will be a sub $200 drive and they can't fit enough NAND into 2.5" form factor, why the hell no one offers 3.5" SSD drives? All cases have slots for these anyway. Just cram 2x MX300 worth of NAND into a 3.5" case and call it a day. 1.5 TB for under 400€, I can see how more people would get these, even in 3.5" size, entirely ditching damn spinning drives.

Probably an inventory issue. Combined with the fact that a new form factor would need dedicated QC resources. Combined with the fact that most users don't pay that much for home storage drives (remember, kids these days like their stuff in the cloud). You get the idea.
And again, I eagerly await the day when I'll be HDD free. I just don't see manufacturers as proactively sabotaging progress. It will happen when it will happen. And these MX300 drives are one more step in the right direction.

 

[RejZoR]

Actually, it's 5 years for Evo and 10 years for Pro. Which is as far as I know leading in class. No other vendor offers as much warranty as Samsung.

 

[Frick]

Actually, it's 5 years for Evo and 10 years for Pro. Which is as far as I know leading in class. No other vendor offers as much warranty as Samsung.

Sandisk Extreme Pro has 10 years as well, but those are from 2014.

 

[Caring1]

Sandisk Extreme Pro has 10 years as well, but those are from 2014.

Yep, the cheap Sandisk I just installed has a 5 year warranty.

 

[bug]

Actually, it's 5 years for Evo and 10 years for Pro. Which is as far as I know leading in class. No other vendor offers as much warranty as Samsung.

I think planar TLC (which seem to be all the rage these days) come with 3 years standard warranty. MLC is 5 years and so is Samsung's 3D TLC. These MX300 should also be good for 5 years, but we'll see.

Bottom line, it's not guaranteed to last for ages. And if 4k video catches on, we'd be needing upgrades even before the warranty runs out. But hey, maybe intel's X-Point can do even better

 

[Octavean]

Considering you can find 1TB SSDs for ~$200 USD one would think that these 750GB drive would indeed be under ~$200 USD.

 

[RejZoR]

I think planar TLC (which seem to be all the rage these days) come with 3 years standard warranty. MLC is 5 years and so is Samsung's 3D TLC. These MX300 should also be good for 5 years, but we'll see.

Bottom line, it's not guaranteed to last for ages. And if 4k video catches on, we'd be needing upgrades even before the warranty runs out. But hey, maybe intel's X-Point can do even better

No 4K video needs 550MB/s sequential transfers. And as for the capacity, still nope. 4K is inconvenient even for cheap big HDD's because it's just so big (like what, 50GB for a movie length content, that's just 40 movies for 2TB drive and even today, not many people even have 2TB HDD's). It's why I'm sticking with 1080p. And I do have 4K LCD TV. It's simply not big enough to waste my time and space with 4K content. You really need like 60 inch TV to make proper use of 4K. And then also watch it at short distance so you can actually see all the details. I find 1080p high quality enough to be honest, even at modest bitrates.

And even if I made 4K content myself, my upload is too crappy even for 1080p so at least in my situation, it just doesn't matter. And when so many factors apply to same content, it means this automatically applies to a lot of people and not just me.

 

[theeldest]

>successor to its best-selling MX200 performance-segment SSD.
>3D TLC flash

Pick one. Also pretty odd capacity. Even though they are using 384Gbit dies, they should configure them to more common capacities like 480 and 960GB.

3D TLC is going to be more equivalent to 2D MLC than it will be to 2D TLC. The cell size for the 3D NAND products is much much larger than the current 2D products.

I can't find the source but at the 15/16nm level, a 2D cell uses 10 - 20 electrons to store the charge. 3D has gone back up to a 40-ish nm process and a cell has 500-ish electrons to store the charge.

So with the larger cell size endurance is much much better than the 2D products and you can use a higher program voltage to get better performance.

TL;DR: 3D TLC will be more performant than 2D MLC.

 

[HugsNotDrugs]

>successor to its best-selling MX200 performance-segment SSD.
>3D TLC flash

Pick one. Also pretty odd capacity. Even though they are using 384Gbit dies, they should configure them to more common capacities like 480 and 960GB.

750GB was a standard size before manufacturers decided to take space away in the name of over provisioning.

Also, 3D NAND is excellent stuff.

 

[HugsNotDrugs]

Considering you can find 1TB SSDs for ~$200 USD one would think that these 750GB drive would indeed be under ~$200 USD.

If all drives were the same you'd have a point...

 

[Filip Georgievski]

I just got a Kingston V300 120GB on a budget, and ill be runing it with a 1TB WD Blue, which is more than i need but then again, my WD gets up to 200Mbps speeds, and since im limited on Sata II, my SSD will get to speeds of 300Mbps, which is a combo that cost me less than 100$.
SSD will be boot storage, and with shortstroking my HDD, ill get 300GB of fast HDD storage, and 700GB of slow speed storage ( storage for docx, movies, music and other stuff).
Still you can get decent performance with combos than a single price hungry SSD.