Crucial MX300 1TB SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch September 16, 2016

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The Crucial MX300 drives have been out for a number of months now and the community feedback on them is very good. For example on Amazon it has a 4.6 our of 5 star rating on 136 verified purchase reviews. Our performance testing on the Crucial MX300 1TB drive found similar performance numbers to the Crucial MX300 750GB Limited Edition drive that we looked at back in June 2016. Sure, this is Crucial’s first 3D TLC NAND product, but it’s got solid performance! Our testing showed that we were able to hit 535 MB/s read and 516MB/s in the sequential benchmark (ATTO) and 92,600 IOPS read and 81,600 IOPS write (iometer) for 4K QD32 random performance. These numbers are close to the drives rated speeds of 530/510 MB/s for sequential and 92k and 83k IOPS for random read/write performance.

Crucial MX300 2.5″ SSD Street Pricing:

MX300 275GB – $69.98 ($0.25 per GB)
MX300 525GB – $119.99 ($0.23 per GB)
MX300 750GB – $177.40 ($0.24 per GB)
MX300 1TB – $249.99 ($0.24 per GB)
MX300 2TB – $549.99 ($0.26 per GB)

When it comes to pricing the Crucial MX300 series drives are priced between $0.23 and $0.26 per GB and that makes them pretty affordable. The Crucial MX 300 1TB drive at $249.99 shipped is pretty enticing as the performance is solid and the Samsung 850 EVO 1TB drive is $305.50 shipped. Spending $55 or 22% more for the Samsung SSD 850 EVO might not be worth it for the minor performance increases seen on that drive. Crucial has a pretty competitive product here and if you are looking for a drive with encryption from a reputable manufacture for HIPPA compliance or something along those lines, the MX300 series is going to be hard to beat at these prices.

The 3-year limited warranty is lacking these days for an SSD targeted at the mainstream market, but the MX300 series does come with respectable endurance ratings of up to 400TB Total Bytes Written (TBW) on the 2TB drive. The Samsung 850 EVO 2TB drive has a longer 5-year warranty, but is only allotted for 300TB for the TBW rating during that time span.

We recommended the Crucial MX300 750GB Limited Edition drive back in June 2016 and now having looked at the ‘regular’ MX300 1TB drive we feel that this product line is still worth recommending. These are solid drives that are worth the investment at these low prices. It’s not the fastest SATA III SSD on the market today, but it’s very well rounded and will make for one heck of an upgrade for anyone still using a mechanical hard drive.

Legit Bottom Line: The Crucial MX300 1TB is one of the best values right now in the SSD market!