Crucial MX300 1TB SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Taking A Look At Sustained Write Performance

Crucial MX300 1TB

Triple-Level Cell TLC NAND based SSDs perform usually quite well, but when you copy a large amount of data to the drive without and idle time you’ll often find a large drop in write speed. TLC NAND is great in applications where write operations are limited , but is usually not recommended for critical systems that have heavy write operations as they have lower endurance ratings than SLC or MLC NAND and of course sustained write performance isn’t stellar. In recent years drive manufactures have been figured out that by using SLC or TLC treated as SLC as a cache they can keep the drives overall write performance high as long as the amount of data being written to the drive fits in the cache. If you overflow the cache, you are then writing directly to the TLC NAND and the write performance will drop down to that level. It should be noted that the SLC cache will clear once the drive idles, so this only impacts long writes that are many GB in size. This might not be a typical workload scenario for this ultra-value or mainstream drives, but still something worth pointing out!

Let’s take a look at some TLC and MLC drives to see how they handle sustained write scenarios.

sustained write MX300

When you average the test results over the 45 second period that we are focusing on these are the average speeds that you come up with:

  • Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB – 527.23 MB/s
  • Crucial MX300 1050GB SSD – 523.89 MB/s
  • Crucial MX300 750GB SSD – 522.4 MB/s
  • Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB SSD – 520.41 MB/s
  • Toshiba OCZ Trion 150 480GB – 347.75 MB/s
  • Kingston UV400 480GB – 267.04 MB/s
  • OCZ Trion 100 480GB – 192.19 MB/s

Not bad, but the performance on the Crucial MX300 1050GB SSD does eventually drop off!

Crucial MX300 Sustained Write

66 seconds into the sustained writes we found that the performance of the drive went from an average of roughly 523 MB/s down to 341 MB/s on average. This means one would have to write just over 24,156 MB (~24GB) of data for to reach this point of lower sustained write performance. Sustained writes are the weakness of any TLC based SSD, so just be aware of it!

Let’s take a look at some common benchmarks!