Crucial MX100 256GB & 512GB SSD Review

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

For the Crucial MX100 drives, the raw capacity for each is 256GB and 512GB (1GB byte = 1,000,000,000 bytes) respectively. After the share is given for the spare area, Windows takes its share we end up with 238GiB and 476GiB (1GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes) available to the user.

Clearly, Crucial is attempting to price others out of the market. Since they (Crucial/Micron) manufacture their own NAND, they are able to price aggressively while still maintaining some semblance of profitability. We’ve been expecting this to happen from the ‘haves’ (those that fabricate their own NAND) and the ‘have nots’ (those needing to source the NAND). Eventually, the small player will be edged out and we’ll be left with a handful of drive makers, similar to what we saw in the hard drive space. The MX100 is very aggressively priced at $79.99, $109.99, and $224.99 for the 128GB, 256GB and 512GB drives respectively. This roughly comes out to a paltry $0.47 per usable GB which is an outstanding value especially for a drive featuring power loss protection and hardware encryption.

So the value is there, how about the performance? All in all, the performance is solid without any glaring issues. It’s not the strongest performer we’ve tested but still fared very well in our comparisons although the capacity dictated the write performance due the 128Gbit NAND and the larger drives able to leverage more of these in parallel. So reads for all top out at 550MB/s but writes range from 150MB/s to 500MB/s. This didn’t cause a large gap in performance in our real world tests but were highlighted in the synthetic tests. The best bang for the buck performance is going to come from the 256GB drive. If you can swing the extra $30 over the 128GB drive, you’ll double the capacity and more than double the write speed potential. As such, the MX100 deserves our value award!

Legit Bottom Line: Crucial has done an excellent job with the MX100 series, offering up a very budget friendly drive with performance and features that we would expect from drives that cost much more.