Introduction

Today, we are reviewing the Crucial BX300 SSD, which is the successor to the Crucial BX200 we reviewed about a year and a half ago. The BX200 was the first drive to introduce Micron TLC flash memory to Crucial's lineup. This move successfully helped bring down SSD pricing significantly - people were demanding cheaper SSDs. However, the BX200 traded a lot of performance (especially during write operations) for lower pricing and ended up falling short of drives using Hynix TLC flash, which came out later and were faster and cheaper as well.



With the Crucial BX Series being budget-oriented, you would expect the BX300 to use TLC too, but that's not the case. Instead, Crucial is using their 1st-generation 3D MLC NAND, which stands in contrast to the MX300 that uses 3D TLC NAND. Surprising decisions here.

What's also surprising is that Micron offers the BX300 in capacities of 120 GB, 240 GB, and 480 GB. A 1 TB option is not available, and I wonder if anyone still buys 120 GB SSDs.

The controller on the drive is a Silicon Motion model, the SM2258 which uses four flash channels and requires a DRAM chip (unlike the SM2258XT variant).

In order to boost flash write performance, Micron designates a small, fixed amount of memory as SLC cache, which writes a single bit to each flash cell instead of two. While much faster, such a setup is basically a speed vs. size tradeoff.