Crucial really surprised us by opting for MLC flash memory at a time where the majority of the market uses TLC chips for their budget-oriented drives. It seems that Samsung's dominance on the SSD market got the company to start some creative thinking. Thanks to the MLC chips and a well-tuned controller, the drive achieves much better performance than its BX200 predecessor, especially when it comes to writes. On the BX200, once the SLC cache was exhausted, performance quickly dropped, sometimes down to mechanical HDD speeds. Not so with the BX300 and its improved SLC cache, which works really well; you'll have a hard time even noticing when it is exhausted.

Overall performance is very good and within a few percent of the fastest SATA drives in our test group. Of course, the M.2 NVMe based drives are much faster in synthetic tests and a bit faster in real-life, but the difference is not that big, especially when you don't copy ISO files all day. Still, it would have been nice of Crucial to offer the BX300 in an M.2 form factor - a growing market where enthusiasts are in dire need of fast and affordable NVMe storage.

What really makes the difference is Crucial's pricing. The tested BX300 480 GB is available for $150, which, while not unheard of, is an extremely good price point for a modern non-TLC drive with good performance. In my opinion, the BX300 is extremely strong competition for Samsung's 850 EVO 512 GB, which currently retails at $150 as well, comes with a warranty that is two years longer, has encryption support, but lacks the MLC chips that make the BX300 excel.