Crucial 750GB Limited Edition MX300 SSD review: At last, a TLC drive with sufficient cache - birknerty1950

At a Glance

Good's Paygrad

Pros

Sir Thomas More squirrel away than most TLC NAND-supported SSDs
Devalued price per G
License for Acronis Sincere Image HD

Cons

Writes relax to 300MBps when squirrel away is exceeded

Our Verdict

Though it's a TLC NAND-founded labour, Crucial has endowed this 750GB SSD with enough cache (30GB) to cover nearly all familiar write operations, not just now smaller time unit ones. Information technology's comparatively inexpensive Eastern Samoa well.

Well, dye my hair red and call me Harpo. A triple-plane-cell (Tender loving care) NAND-founded SSD that I can buoy recommend to users without much of caveats finally exists. That is, but if they can't find a like-priced multi-level-cellular telephone (MLC) drive. (Andonly and so.)

The drive doubtful? Life-and-death's 750GB Limited Version MX300, which retails for a mere $179 on Amazon. "Mere" in the SSD-globe, at to the lowest degree. What's unusual? This version of the MX300 actually has enough fast NAND cache to provide maximum performance during all the write operations a user will perform, non just the casual ones. Almost all, anyway.

Spectacles

The 15nm Micrometer 3D (stacked) TLC NAND used in the Limited Version 750GB MX300 performs roughly on par with Samsung's and Toshiba's. Only in the vitrine of this drive, Determinative decided to treat more of it (30GB!) American Samoa MLC: That is, writing only two bits instead of the three that TLC is capable of. Not writing that third bit some reduces the amount of data being written by a third and requires less voltage, making totally the difference speed-wise: 30GB was more than enough to hide our 20GB copy tests, copying a 30GB Blu-irradiatio rip, and a whole lot of other familiar tasks. Beautiful much anything you'll do will be covered past that 30GB, with the exception of the initial cloning operation that you'll perform when replacing a hard drive Oregon a similar large-descale procedure.

Speaking of cloning, Crucial includes a voucher for Acronis' Echt Image HD software to facilitate that operation. Given the low price of the drive, that's a bad too-generous perk.

crucial mx300ssd 25in 750gb ssd box front — The box for the 2.5-inch 750GB MX300 includes a voucher for Acronis True Image HD, so that you can dead ringer your present hard drive onto the MX300.

Of the essence transmitted us the 2.5-inch, 7mm version of the MX300, merely an M.2 version will equal available later in the twelvemonth. Some will be SATA 6Gbps. The MX300's controller is a Andrew Marvell 88SS1074, with some tweaking to the firmware by Of the essence. I'm taking the vendor's word for that—SSD vendors, including Crucial, are devising it quite a little more difficult to open ahead the case these days.

The drive comes with a quintet-year warranty that covers 120GB of writes per day, or approximately 220TBW (terabytes written). It features encoding, and is also said to write data in multiple locations for redundancy (a safeguard against failing cells or NAND chips).

Testing

As the 750GB version contains 30GB of cache, no drop-off happened between the AS SSD benchmark software's 1GB test and 10GB test. That's not a ailment. Using slower TLC with quicker cache isn't an unusable innovation; it's just that past SSDs designed this way had cache sizes that werewanting for immense write trading operations. As I same up front man, other than the original cloning of the drive, 30GB should generally cover everything you do.

crucial mx300 as ssd 10gb — AS SSD doesn't compose enough data to exceed the MX300's cache, merely that highlights the benefits of treating more of the NAND as MLC.

In our 20GB copy tests shown below, the MX300 performed ilk MLC NAND-founded drives, which sport faster flash memory that doesn't need caching and doesn't show performance drop-offs—albeit a slightly slower peerless.

crucial mx300 20gb copies — Yet our formerly illustrative 20GB copy tests didn't reveal the M300's TLC nature.

crucial 30gb dropoff 100665929 orig — The MX300's write operationwill bead soured to a little to a lesser degree 300MBps, but you'll let to transfer much more data than with other TLC NAND-based drives to hit that point. This was a 50GB copy.

As seen above, it took a 50GB transcript to finally show what happens when a write process waterfall outside the 750GB Limited Edition MX300's 30MB cache. The speed drops to about 275MBps, or roughly 10MBps slower than with the Samsung EVO 850, but information technology's still along par with OCZ's Trion 150 and Toshiba's Q300 (not-Pro version).

Conclusion

If you're looking for a large-content SSD at the lowest thinkable price—and one that won't regularly let you down with sub-par large-charge write execution—the Finite Edition 750GB MX300 is the driving force for you. That is, unless you get hold often on an MLC drive. That caveat bears repeating.

Note: This review applies only to the Limited Version 750GB MX300. Other versions and/or capacities of the MX300 may not be so amply endowed with lay away.