Crucial MX300 2 TB

[W1zzard]

The Crucial MX300 2 TB is the biggest SSD in the company's lineup. It provides a staggering 2050 GB of capacity, which should be plenty for everyone. Thanks to its good performance and outstanding price of 27 cents per GB, this is the drive you want if you need tons of fast storage.

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[bug]

You shouldn't have used 200-256GB drives in this test. Those typically do not use all the channels on the controller and thus are supposed to perform worse.

That said, I'm currently looking for a 1TB drive and if I can't get a good price on a 850 EVO, I'm definitely going with a MX300.

 

[Readlight]

How long it would survive if i every day write in one game?

 

[bug]

How long it would survive if i every day write in one game?

Longer than a mechanical drive.

 

[RejZoR]

I don't want to be a grumpy one, but what's the point of comparing 2TB drive to 1TB and 250GB drives? If someone is investe into buying 2TB SSD, they're gonna be interested how it stacks up against other 2TB SSD's like Samsung 850 Pro and 850 Evo. Especially since there isn't whole lot of choice at these capacities...

 

[jsfitz54]

I don't want to be a grumpy one, but what's the point of comparing 2TB drive to 1TB and 250GB drives? If someone is investe into buying 2TB SSD, they're gonna be interested how it stacks up against other 2TB SSD's like Samsung 850 Pro and 850 Evo. Especially since there isn't whole lot of choice at these capacities...

I had the exact same thought when I read the charts comparing a 250GB drive to a 2TB drive, so you are not alone.

No mention if they scale the same way.

I own Crucial, Samsung and Plextor drives, all SATA 6 and have been considering 1TB or 2TB drives, so the review going into the holiday season is great.

 

[W1zzard]

How long it would survive if i every day write in one game?

400 TBW endurance. 400 * 1024 = 409,600 GB

5 years = 5*365 = 1825 days

400 * 1024 / 1825 = 224 GB per day

 

[Chaitanya]

Surprised Crucial hasn't released Mx400 yet after they updated their BX line recently with better performing NAND.

 

[bug]

Surprised Crucial hasn't released Mx400 yet after they updated their BX line recently with better performing NAND.

They're probably selling BX300 at a loss (being MLC and everything), that would explain why they don't migrate more of their lineup.

 

[Solaris17]

Thank you SO MUCH for including SQL performance!

 

[StrayKAT]

They're probably selling BX300 at a loss (being MLC and everything), that would explain why they don't migrate more of their lineup.

And yet even the BX is behind Intel's 545s now (err.. well, it's 64 layer at least), and have Optane products rolling out. What the hell are they even doing in this partnership?

 

[newtekie1]

Another SATA SSD that performance wise will be indistinguishable from every other current SATA SSD on the market. Not that that is Crucial's fault, we've just pretty much maxed out SATA at this point.

They're probably selling BX300 at a loss (being MLC and everything), that would explain why they don't migrate more of their lineup.

I thought I had read somewhere that the BX300 drive was using the same NAND chips as the MX300, but running them in MLC mode. Likely because they are chips that failed QA for TLC, so they were bumped down to run in MLC mode which is less demanding. So, they aren't really losing money on them, since they are using chips that would have otherwise just ended up in the recycle bin.

 

[CheapMeat]

When drives use SLC for cache/buffer, it means they aren't using DRAM, right? Or do they use both DRAM and SLC?

I don't want to be a grumpy one, but what's the point of comparing 2TB drive to 1TB and 250GB drives? If someone is investe into buying 2TB SSD, they're gonna be interested how it stacks up against other 2TB SSD's like Samsung 850 Pro and 850 Evo. Especially since there isn't whole lot of choice at these capacities...

Usually because drives inherently scale to higher performance with the more chips (usually higher GB) they have I believe because the NAND chips act like RAID0, as in the load is spread more, from the controller to the chips. And also the drives are significantly faster when empty, rather than full; so with 2TB vs say 128GB, there's more fresh blocks to write on, etc. So I guess it's thrown in as a performance comparison of scaling to give a sense of it. But I'm not positive about this.

 

[pokazene_maslo]

W1zzard:
You didn't mention one of the biggest selling points of this SSD - encryption. Most SDDs by Crucial support TCG OPAL 2.0 and IEEE 1667. MX300 is a Self Encrypting Drive (SED). Users that use at least Windows 8 Professional can use Hardware accelerated BitLocker without any slowdown of their computers.

Anandtech had a great article about it: https://www.anandtech.com/show/6891...ndows-8-edrive-investigated-with-crucial-m500
https://www.anandtech.com/show/6891...ndows-8-edrive-investigated-with-crucial-m500
Besides that I miss power consumption tests. I'm sure laptop users will find that usefull.

 

[bug]

When drives use SLC for cache/buffer, it means they aren't using DRAM, right? Or do they use both DRAM and SLC?

Are you talking system DRAM or DRAM that's usually embedded onto SSDs? The answer is "no" anyway.

 

[Aquinus]

When drives use SLC for cache/buffer, it means they aren't using DRAM, right? Or do they use both DRAM and SLC?

You won't have SLC mixed with another type of flash but, DRAM is often used as a cache for the controller.

 

[Athlonite]

The Crucial MX300 2 TB is the biggest SSD in the company's lineup. It provides a staggering 2050 GB of capacity

Um no it doesn't it only gives you 1905 GB of usable capacity, seeing as you can't use an unformatted drive for storing anything on the staggering capacity is 1905GB I'd have been really impressed if they actually turned out a formatted capacity of 2050GB or hell even 2000GB closer to the mark than the 1905GB's

 

[lexluthermiester]

They're probably selling BX300 at a loss (being MLC and everything), that would explain why they don't migrate more of their lineup.

No storage supplier sells at a loss this early in the life-cycle of a product. At the end they might sell to break even. You're thinking of video game system makers and that rarely happens now.

Users that use at least Windows 8 Professional can use Hardware accelerated BitLocker without any slowdown of their computers.

This is a non-feature to some. BitLocker has a known backdoor and can be cracked even without it. Hardware encryption done right would be the use of TrueCrypt or VeraCrypt in conjunction with a CPU that has AES instructions built-in.

 

[StrayKAT]

The Crucial MX300 2 TB is the biggest SSD in the company's lineup. It provides a staggering 2050 GB of capacity

Um no it doesn't it only gives you 1905 GB of usable capacity, seeing as you can't use an unformatted drive for storing anything on the staggering capacity is 1905GB I'd have been really impressed if they actually turned out a formatted capacity of 2050GB or hell even 2000GB closer to the mark than the 1905GB's

Does anyone actually make 2TB? I think this is common. Even my HDD/WD Black 2TB is 1.9.

Which btw I'd rather use than the hefty price of expensive SSDs (but I cache it). I hope they get cheaper. I'll pay for a good and smaller OS SSD, but I'll be very happy the day the large SSD prices drop.

 

[bug]

The Crucial MX300 2 TB is the biggest SSD in the company's lineup. It provides a staggering 2050 GB of capacity

Um no it doesn't it only gives you 1905 GB of usable capacity, seeing as you can't use an unformatted drive for storing anything on the staggering capacity is 1905GB I'd have been really impressed if they actually turned out a formatted capacity of 2050GB or hell even 2000GB closer to the mark than the 1905GB's

Hardware vendors always use GB whereas OSes use GiB, hence the disparity. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte

 

[Parn]

Would love to have one of these for my home server. It's just that ever since the spontaneous reboot bug I had with my MX100 256GB (RMA'ed the first one, still same problem with the replacement. Moved to sammy 850 pro, problem solved), I'm still skeptical about Crucial SSDs.

 

[bug]

Would love to have one of these for my home server. It's just that ever since the spontaneous reboot bug I had with my MX100 256GB (RMA'ed the first one, still same problem with the replacement. Moved to sammy 850 pro, problem solved), I'm still skeptical about Crucial SSDs.

Imho, you're being overly cautious. OCZ's Vertex 3 had some known issues, but if, following your own logic, I would have stayed away from Vertex 4 because of that, I would have missed a couple of great drives.
But yes, paying a few hundred $$$ on a (any) product only to have it act up is anything by confidence inspiring.

 

[gregzeng]

My old 2013 notebook computer (Dell XPS-15) already has the m.2 Samsung 850 SSD, of (only) ONE terabyte (1 TB). But the spinning HDD is a slow two TB, 2.5 INCH. Upgrade to add a two TB SSD is next. Prefer 2.5 inch, so that I can keep the old Samsung 850. My old Samsung 850 is now half the price I paid one year ago. Hopefully the 2 TB 850 is available in m.2 or 2.5 inch case.

The "crucial mx300" tested seemed slightly worse than the Samsung 850 items. So I'm still hopping, from here in Australia.

 

[bug]

My old 2013 notebook computer (Dell XPS-15) already has the m.2 Samsung 850 SSD, of (only) ONE terabyte (1 TB). But the spinning HDD is a slow two TB, 2.5 INCH. Upgrade to add a two TB SSD is next. Prefer 2.5 inch, so that I can keep the old Samsung 850. My old Samsung 850 is now half the price I paid one year ago. Hopefully the 2 TB 850 is available in m.2 or 2.5 inch case.

The "crucial mx300" tested seemed slightly worse than the Samsung 850 items. So I'm still hopping, from here in Australia.

The 850 is available in 2.5" form factor.

But as far as "slightly worse" is concerned, that's a non-issue. Always get the cheaper SSD, you won't feel the performance difference. Especially since it's not your primary drive, so it won't be hammered much.
At the very least, try to disregard synthetic benchmarks and look at real-life applications - the speed of the SSD doesn't matter as much (it's the access time you want and that is pretty clear cut by now).

 

[Athlonite]

Hardware vendors always use GB whereas OSes use GiB, hence the disparity. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte

I already know that as do 99.9% of users visiting these forums (or atleast they should) but Drive manufactures still seem to persist with the lie and reviewers shouldn't still be falling for their BS and state the real formated capacity instead of the fairy tale that HDD/SSD manufacturers say they are then maybe they'd pick up their game and actually produce drives of the capacity they say they are