Crucial MX300 1TB SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Anvil Storage Utilities

Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0

Along with the move to a new platform, we decided to make a change in one of the benchmarks. 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 4, 16, and 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.

Anvil SSD Benchmark with 100% Compression (incompressible data):

MX300 1TB Anvil Benchmark

Benchmark Results: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) the Crucial MX300 1050GB SSD scored 4,762.72. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB drive scored 5,374 points and we got 4,631 points on the OCZ Trion 150 480GB SSD, so this drive is in the ball park.

Anvil SSD Applications Benchmark at 46% Compression:

MX300 1TB Anvil Benchmark

Benchmark Results: With the compression at 46% to help mimic real world applications better we found the overall score dropped by just one point on the MX300 1TB drive, but it was well within the margin of error for a general run.