Crucial MX200 and BX100 Series SSD Review

CrystalDiskMark & Anvil IOPS

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 – Intel Z97 Platform

Benchmark Results: Curiously, the BX100 drive has a little bit better showing than the two MX200 drives here and all fare better than the older MX100 drives – especially in the 4k writes where there’s a significant improvement. This is an important performance increase as a lot of computing happens with small file sizes.

There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 32. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.

Benchmark Results: The MX200 IOPS scores are excellent with the reads and writes being nearly identical for the 500GB and 1TB drives and the BX100, while not quite as strong, is still pretty solid and above where we see many budget drives.