Crucial MX200 500GB SSD Review

Crucial's newest SSD is slated to replace their best bang for the buck MX100. However, is the MX200 a worthy replacement?

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Manufacturer: Crucial
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TweakTown's Rating: 92%
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The Bottom Line

Crucial's MX200 is a worthy replacement for their MX100 SSD. Quality components, high performance, a great price, and class leading endurance make Crucial's MX200 solid state drive a must have.

Introduction, Drive Specifications, Pricing and Availability

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Today, we've got Crucial's newest SSD on the bench. Crucial's MX200 is essentially a second-generation MX100. Crucial's MX100 was and is one of the best performing low-cost SSD's on the market. Right off the bat, we notice that the MX200 differs from the MX100 in that the MX200 has 8 flash packages as opposed to 16 flash packages that the MX100 sports. This means (we think) that the MX100's flash packages have four 64Gbit die per package and the MX200's flash packages have four 128Gbit die per flash package. The MX100 is outfitted with sixteen 32GB flash packages, and the MX200 eight 64GB flash packages. The MX100 employs zero over-provisioning; the MX200 utilizes a small amount of over-provisioning, resulting in a far greater endurance (Terabytes Written or TBW) rating.

That small amount of overprovisioning combined with high quality Micron NAND results in Crucial's MX200 delivering class leading endurance. The 500GB capacity point MX200 we are testing today has an endurance rating of 160 TBW. That's huge, in fact, that's even better than Samsung's 3D-NAND powered 850 EVO. As a point of comparison, the MX100 has a TBW rating of 72TB. Crucial's MX100 has blistering speeds at a 512GB capacity point, but lacks compelling write speed at the 250GB capacity point. Crucial has addressed this performance disparity by employing a proprietary SLC programed caching layer called Dynamic Write Acceleration (DWA). Another differentiator between the MX100 and the MX200 is that the MX200 is available in a 1TB capacity. The MX100's highest capacity point is 512GB.

Crucial addresses performance on the MX200 in comparison to certain competing solutions, in that the MX200 reads and writes compressed and uncompressed data at the same blistering speed. Compression slowdown is a real issue because almost all data is compressed in one form or another. Crucial's aforementioned proprietary DWA caching technology enhances performance: DWA differs from competing emulated SLC layer solutions, because it is dynamic in nature. Crucial's caching layer is self-adjusting, so it doesn't fill up resulting in a marked drop in write speed like we see from other emulated SLC layer solutions. DWA is exclusive to the MX200's 2.5" 250GB SSD, and both the 250GB and the 500GB mSATA and M.2 drives.

Crucial addresses data protection with a multi-pronged solution. The MX200 provides host power-loss protection with on-board capacitors that provide enough power to flush in-flight data to the drives non-volatile NAND array. Crucial's MX200 utilizes RAIN parity technology as well as host power-loss measures to insure data integrity is on a level rarely seen in consumer-class SSD's. These measures are just part of Crucial's exclusive 4-layer data defense scheme.

Crucial's MX200 is thermally protected by Crucial's Adaptive Thermal Protection technology. This technology dynamically adjusts storage component activity based on how the drive is being used, allowing your MX200 to stay nice and cool. To keep your data safe from unwanted intrusion and theft, the MX200 can be encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption. Crucial's MX200 meets or exceeds all industry encryption standards, including IEEE-1667 compliance, TCG Opal 2.0 and Microsoft eDrive.

With all these features, Crucial's MX200 is a well-rounded SSD. However, we are curious to see how a reduction in parallelism (going from 16 flash packages to 8) will affect performance, or if it will have any affect at all. Let's see, shall we?

Specifications

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Crucial's MX200 SATA III SSD is available in three capacity sizes: 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB. Sequential performance of the MX200 is listed at 555/500 read/write. Random read/write performance is listed at up to 100,000/87,000 IOPS at all capacity points. Of particular interest is the high endurance guarantee that the MX200 carries. The 250GB capacity MX200 comes with a TBW guarantee of 80TB, the 500GB capacity a TBW guarantee of 160TB and the 1TB model a guaranteed TBW of 320TB. This is class leading endurance and something virtually unseen from consumer based SSD's to this point.

Crucial's MX200 SATA III SSD comes in a 2.5" x 7mm Z-height form factor as well as an mSATA model and and (2) M.2 SATA interfaced form factors. The 2.5" SSD ships with a spacer should you need to increase the drives thickness to 9.5mm. Crucial includes an Acronis key as a value add. Crucial backs the MX200 with an industry standard three-year warranty or TBW allowed during the three-year warranty period, whichever comes first.

PRICING: You can find the Crucial MX200 500GB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive for sale below. The prices listed are valid at the time of writing, but can change at any time. Click the link to see the very latest pricing for the best deal.

United States: The Crucial MX200 500GB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive retails for $199.99 at Amazon.

Australia: The Crucial MX200 500GB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive retails for $349 at PLE Computers.

Canada: The Crucial MX200 500GB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive retails for CDN$258.83 at Amazon Canada.

Drive Details, Test System Setup, Array Properties

Drive Details - Crucial MX200 SATA III 2.5" 500GB SSD

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Crucial packages their MX200 SATA III SSD in an attractive blue and silver flip-top box. There is a picture of the drive on the top of the box.

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The rear of the box lists the contents, as well as another picture of the drive and the included spacer.

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Here is the complete contents of the drives packaging.

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Crucial moved away from their typical reverse labeling with the MX200. The top and sides of the drives enclosure are formed from a single piece of sheet aluminum that interlocks with the bottom half of the enclosure. The enclosure is natural aluminum in color. There is an attractive blue and silver sticker on the face of the top half of the drives enclosure.

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The bottom and inner sides of the drives enclosure are formed from another single piece of interlocking sheet aluminum. A manufacturer's sticker lists the drives capacity, shipping firmware, model number, serial number, and various other relevant information.

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Here's what Crucial's MX200 500GB SSD looks like completely disassembled.

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Cracking the enclosure open, we are presented with the rear half of the drives PCB. There are a few surface mounted components, and a couple of capacitors that service the drives DRAM package, but other than that, the rear half of the PCB is pretty barren.

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There are a total of (8) 64GB 16nm BGA NAND packages, (1) 512MB DDR DRAM package and a Marvell 88SS9189-BLD2 flash processor. Host power-loss protection is provided via capacitors; eight capacitors servicing the drives 8 NAND Packages are located on this side of the PCB. The PCB is secured to the enclosure by a single screw and two locator pins. All chips on the board make contact with a Mylar type thermal sheet that is affixed to the underside of the top half of the drives enclosure. There is a thick white non-thermal foam strip that acts as a spacer affixed to the bottom of the drives enclosure ensuring that the PCB stays secured within the locating pins.

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Here is a close-in view of the drives controller. Crucial is again utilizing Marvell's 8-channel 88SS9189-BLD2 FSP.

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This is a close-in view of one of the drives (8) 64GB flash packages (512GB total). The NAND utilized is Micron's own 16nm MLC flash in BGA packages.

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Finally, a close-in view of the drives lone DRAM package. This LPDDR2 DRAM package is 512MB (4Gb) in density and sports a data rate of 1066MHz.

Test System Setup

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- Drive Properties

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The majority of our testing is performed with our test drive as our boot volume. Our boot volume is 75% full for all OS Disk "C" drive testing to replicate a typical consumer OS volume implementation. We feel that most of you will be utilizing your SSD's for your boot volume and that presenting you with results from an OS volume is more relevant than presenting you with empty secondary volume results.

System settings: Cstates and Speed stepping are both disabled in our systems BIOS. Windows High Performance power plan is enabled. Windows write caching is enabled, and Windows buffer flushing is disabled. We are utilizing Windows 8.1 64-bit for all of our testing except for our MOP (Maxed-Out Performance) benchmarks where we switch to Windows Server 2008 R2 64 Bit.

SSD Toolbox

Micron Storage Executive SSD Toolbox

A couple months back, Micron introduced a nice piece of software for SSD management. This toolbox works with all Crucial SSD's from the M500 forward. Storage Executive has all the necessary management features that compliment SSD ownership. With Storage Executive, you can monitor your drive's health, view how much data has been written to the drive, perform a secure erase and update firmware easily.

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Storage Executive opens in your internet browser.

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The System Information tab gives you a brief system overview, lists your attached SATA drives, their health status, capacity, serial number and firmware status. The System Information page tells you the current temperature of your Crucial/Micron drives.

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Clicking on a drive gives you more detailed information, including the amount of data that has been written to the drive over its lifetime.

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If we hit the Sanitize Drive tab, we can select the Crucial/Micron drive we want to secure erase. Note: You can only SE in AHCI mode, RAID mode does not work, and is our lone complaint about Storage Executive.

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Before Storage Executive will reboot your computer and secure erase it, you have to grant permission.

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The Firmware Update tab allows you to update your drive's firmware. Ours is up to date.

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The S.M.A.R.T. tab lists all monitored attributes of your Crucial/Micron drive. Overall, Micron's Storage Executive is a very nice piece of management software. The only complaint we have is that you have to be in AHCI mode for the Sanitize Drive function to work. It would be nice if it would work in RAID mode as well.

Synthetic Benchmarks - ATTO, Anvil Storage Utilities, CrystalDiskMark & AS SSD

ATTO

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.47

ATTO is a timeless benchmark used to provide manufacturers with data used for marketing storage products.

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Sequential read transfers max out at 527MB/s. Sequential write transfers max out at 498MB/s. Read speed is not quite hitting spec, but keep in mind that this is our boot volume and it's 75% full.

Sequential Write

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Sequentially, our MX200 is beating Intel's 730, but falling behind the rest of the drives on our chart. The MX200's performance curve is practically identical to the MX100.

Sequential Read

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Both our MX100 and our MX200 are able to outperform our Intel drive, but trail the 850 Pro and Extreme Pro by a significant margin, especially at smaller file transfer sizes.

Anvil Storage Utilities

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.1.0

Anvil's Storage Utilities is a storage benchmark designed to measure the storage performance of SSD's. The Standard Storage Benchmark performs a series of tests; you can run a full test or just the read or write test, or you can run a single test, i.e. 4k QD16.

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Scoring

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Anvil's scoring gives a good indication of a drives overall performance. In terms of score, both the MX100 and MX200 are able to outpace the Extreme Pro and 730. Our Extreme Pro is only 240GB, but that's okay because the 240GB Extreme Pro is the fastest of the Extreme Pro series.

Read IOPS through Queue Depth Scale

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As expected, Samsung's 850 Pro outpaces the competition in this test. The MX100 and MX200 have an identical performance curve at lower queue depths. The MX100 inherently has more parallelism in play than the MX200 and this may be a factor as to why the MX100 has slightly more top end.

Write IOPS through Queue Scale

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Random write performance at low QD is exactly where Crucial's MX series SSDs excel. Low QD write performance is what we consider the most important performance metric. Both the MX100 and MX200 have better low QD random write performance than the competition. We think that the MX100's parallelism is a factor in delivering better performance than the MX200 at low QD.

CrystalDiskMark

Version and / or Patch Used: 3.0 Technical Preview

CrystalDiskMark is disk benchmark software that allows us to benchmark 4k and 4k queue depths with accuracy.

Note: Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 Technical Preview was used for these tests since it offers the ability to measure native command queuing at QD4.

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Looking at our read chart confirms exactly what we saw with our Anvil IOPS testing. The MX100 and MX200 perform identically until we hit QD32 where the MX100 pulls ahead slightly. Low QD random performance is most important in an OS environment, and in this regard, Crucial's MX series is lagging a bit in comparison to the rest of the drives on our chart, all of which happen to be read-centric.

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Crucial's MX series drives have better low QD random write performance than the others on our chart.

AS SSD

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.7.4739.38088

AS SSD determines the performance of Solid-State Drives (SSD). The tool contains four synthetic as well as three practice tests. The synthetic tests are to determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD.

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The MX100 and MX200 both have awesome write performance, and it shows. Only Samsung's 850 Pro is able to best them in this area. This is somewhat misleading as so much of AS SSD's scoring is derived from the 64-thread portion of the test, giving the 850 Pro an inherent scoring advantage. Let's see what our trace-based testing reveals.

Benchmarks (Trace Based OS Volume) - PCMark Vantage, PCMark 7 & PCMark 8

Light Usage Model

We are going to categorize these tests as indicative of a light workload. If you utilize your computer for light workloads like browsing the web, checking emails, light gaming, and office related tasks, then this category of results is most relevant for your needs.

PCMark Vantage - Hard Disk Tests

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.2.0.0

The reason we like PCMark Vantage is because the recorded traces are played back without system stops. What we see is the raw performance of the drive. This allows us to see a marked difference between scoring that other trace-based benchmarks do not exhibit. An example of a marked difference in scoring on the same drive would be empty vs. filled vs. steady state.

We run Vantage three ways. The first run is with the OS drive 75% full to simulate a lightly used OS volume filled with data to an amount we feel is common for most users. The second run is with the OS volume written into a "Steady State" utilizing SNIA's guidelines. Steady state testing simulates a drives performance similar to that of a drive that has been subjected to consumer workloads for extensive amounts of time. The third run is a Vantage HDD test with the test drive attached as an empty, lightly used secondary device.

OS Volume 75% Full - Lightly Used

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OS Volume 75% Full - Steady State

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Secondary Volume Empty - Lightly Used

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As you can see, there's a big difference between an empty drive, one that's 75% full/used, and one that's in a steady state.

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The important scores to pay attention to are "OS Volume Steady State" and "OS Volume 75% full." These two categories are most important because they are indicative of typical of consumer user states. When a drive is in a steady state, it means garbage collection is running at the same time it's reading/writing. This is exactly why we focus on steady state performance.

In this round of testing, Crucial's MX series drives outperform both the Intel 730, and SanDisk's Extreme Pro. The MX100 and MX200 are essentially tied for second best performance, behind Samsung's 850 Pro.

PCMark 7 - System Storage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.4.0

We will look to the Raw System Storage scoring for an evaluation because it's done without system stops and therefore allows us to see significant scoring differences between drives.

OS Volume 75% Full - Lightly Used

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There is little difference between the drives on this chart with the exception of Samsung's 850 Pro. Samsung's flagship SATA III outperforms the rest of the group by a large margin in this test.

PCMark 8 - Storage Bandwidth

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.4.304

We use PCMark 8 Storage benchmark to test the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, and a selection of popular games. You can test the system drive or any other recognized storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices.

OS Volume 75% Full - Lightly Used

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PCMark 8 is the most intensive light model workload simulation we run. Things change quickly as we progress through our benchmark suite. This time Crucial's MX200 performs just as well as Samsung's 850 Pro.

Benchmarks (Secondary Volume) - Max IOPS, Disk Response & Transfer Rates

Iometer - Maximum IOPS

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.1.0

We use Iometer to measure high queue depth performance.

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We are able to hit Crucial's marketed figure of 100,000 random read IOPS and able to exceed the MX200's 87,000 random write IOPS marketing spec.

Iometer - Disk Response

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.1.0

We use Iometer to measure disk response times. Disk response times are measured at an industry accepted standard of 4k QD1 for both write and read. Each test is run twice for 30 seconds consecutively, with a 5-second ramp-up before each test. The test drive/array is partitioned and attached as a secondary device for this testing.

Write Response

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Read Response

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Average Disk Response

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Both our MX series drives have better write response times than the rest of the field. Our MX100 has the best write response time. Read response times of Crucial's MX200 are slower than the rest of the drives on our chart.

DiskBench - Directory Copy

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.6.2.0

We use DiskBench to time a 28.6GB block (9,882 files in 1,247 folders) of mostly incompressible random data as it's transferred from our DC P3700 PCIe NVME SSD to our test drive. We then read from a 6GB zip file that's part of our 28.6GB data block to determine the test drives read transfer rate. The system is restarted prior to the read test to clear any cached data, ensuring an accurate test result.

Write Transfer Rate

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Read Transfer Rate

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The MX200 kills our transfer test. Look at how much faster the MX200 can write a large chunk of data than any other comparable SATA III SSD. The MX200 is about 11% faster than Samsung's 850 Pro, and nearly 13% faster than the MX100. Keep in mind the MX200 model we are testing today does not have an emulated SLC caching layer.

Benchmarks (Secondary Volume) - PCMark 8 Extended

Futuremark PCMark 8 Extended - Consistency Test

Heavy Usage Model

We consider PCMark 8's consistency test to be our heavy usage model test. This is the usage model most enthusiasts, heavy duty gamers, and professionals fall into. If you do a lot of gaming, audio/video processing, rendering, or have workloads of this nature, then this test will be most relevant to you. PCMark 8 has built-in, command line executed storage testing. The PCMark 8 Consistency test measures the performance consistency and the degradation tendency of a storage system.

The Storage test workloads are repeated. Between each repetition, the storage system is bombarded with a usage that causes degraded drive performance. In the first part of the test, the cycle continues until a steady degraded level of performance has been reached. (Steady State)

In the second part, the recovery of the system is tested by allowing the system to idle and measuring the performance after 5-minute long intervals. (Internal drive maintenance: Garbage Collection (GC)) The test reports the performance level at the start, the degraded steady-state, and the recovered state, as well as the number of iterations required to reach the degraded state and the recovered state.

We feel Futuremark's Consistency Test is the best test ever devised to show the true performance of solid-state storage in a heavy usage scenario. This test takes on average 13 to 17 hours to complete, and writes somewhere between 450GB and 14,000GB of test data depending on the drive being tested. If you want to know what an SSD's performance is going to look like after a few months or even years of heavy usage, this test will show you.

Here's a breakdown of Futuremark's Consistency Test:

Precondition phase:

1. Write to the drive sequentially through up to the reported capacity with random data.

2. Write the drive through a second time (to take care of overprovisioning).

Degradation phase:

1. Run writes of random size between 8*512 and 2048*512 bytes on random offsets for 10 minutes.

2. Run performance test (one pass only).

3. Repeat 1 and 2 for 8 times, and on each pass increase the duration of random writes by 5 minutes.

Steady state phase:

1. Run writes of random size between 8*512 and 2048*512 bytes on random offsets for 50 minutes.

2. Run performance test (one pass only).

3. Repeat 1 and 2 for 5 times.

Recovery phase:

1. Idle for 5 minutes.

2. Run performance test (one pass only).

3. Repeat 1 and 2 for 5 times.

Storage Bandwidth

PCMark 8's Consistency test provides a ton of data output that we can use to judge a drives performance.

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We consider steady state bandwidth (the blue bar) our test that carries the most weight in ranking a drive/arrays performance. Performance after Garbage Collection (GC) (the orange and red bars) is what we consider the second most important consideration when ranking a drives performance. Trace based consistency testing is where true high performing SSDs are separated from the rest of the pack.

What impresses us about the MX200 is that it performs 53.7% better in this steady state (blue bar) heavy usage simulation than the MX100. As we see it, this result and our transfer testing results verify beyond any doubt that the MX200 is considerably faster than the MX100 despite a reduction in parallelism. This is a clear demonstration of what even a small amount of overprovisioning can do for a drive's steady state performance.

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We chart our test subject's storage bandwidth as reported at each of the test's 18 trace iterations. This gives us a good visual perspective of how our test subjects perform as testing progresses.

Total Access Time (Latency)

We chart the total time the disk is accessed as reported at each of the test's 18 trace iterations.

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Disk Busy Time

Disk Busy Time is how long the disk is busy working. We chart the total time the disk is working as reported at each of the tests 18 trace iterations.

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When latency is low, disk busy time is low as well.

Data Written

We measure the total amount of random data that our test drive/array is capable of writing during the degradation phases of the consistency test. Pre-conditioning data is not included in the total. The total combined time that degradation data is written to the drive/array is 470 minutes. This can be very telling. The better the drive/array can process a continuous stream of random data, the more data will be written.

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The results of this test again demonstrate the MX200 can deliver superior performance in comparison to the MX100 it is replacing.

Maxed-Out Performance (MOP)

This is where we show you what our test subjects performance looks like when powered by the fastest operating system with regard to storage ever made; Windows Server 2008. This is the exact same hardware just an OS change.

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You can't get performance like this from Windows 8 or 8.1, you can get very close with Windows 7, but nothing performs as well as Server 2008 when it comes to solid state storage. 4K write performance is vastly superior on Server 2008 and Windows 7 in comparison to Windows 8, 8.1 or Server 2012.

Final Thoughts

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Crucial's MX200 is indeed a worthy replacement for one of our all-time favorite SSD's; the MX100. In our opinion, Crucial's MX200 is the best bang for the buck SSD on the market today. It's not the fastest SATA III SSD on the market, but Crucial's MX200 is certainly among the fastest. Most drives in the MX200's price range are utilizing inferior TLC flash to keep costs low. Not Crucial, they utilizing premium MLC flash in BGA packages.

Crucial's MX series SSDs are the only drives in their class that have onboard host power-loss protection. Host power-loss protection is just one piece of Crucial's exclusive four-layer Data Defense scheme ensuring data protection to a level that far exceeds industry standards. What impresses us most about Crucial's MX200 is how it delivers by far the best write transfer rates we've seen from any SATA III SSD.

Let's talk for a moment about what we liked and disliked about Crucial's MX200 500GB SATA III SSD.

What we disliked: We would have liked to have a five-year warranty instead of a three-year warranty.

What we liked: Premium components, superior write prowess, Crucial's four-layer data protection package composed of host power-loss protection, RAIN data parity, Adaptive Thermal Protection and advanced hardware level encryption, class leading endurance. Most of all, we love the pricing.

We can recommend Crucial's 500GB MX200 without reservation.

PRICING: You can find the Crucial MX200 500GB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive for sale below. The prices listed are valid at the time of writing, but can change at any time. Click the link to see the very latest pricing for the best deal.

United States: The Crucial MX200 500GB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive retails for $199.99 at Amazon.

Australia: The Crucial MX200 500GB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive retails for $349 at PLE Computers.

Canada: The Crucial MX200 500GB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive retails for CDN$258.83 at Amazon Canada.

TweakTown award
Performance 90%
Quality including Design and Build 92%
General Features 92%
Bundle and Packaging 90%
Value for Money 98%
Overall 92%

The Bottom Line: Crucial's MX200 is a worthy replacement for their MX100 SSD. Quality components, high performance, a great price, and class leading endurance make Crucial's MX200 solid state drive a must have.

PRICING: You can find products similar to this one for sale below.

USUnited States: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon.com

UKUnited Kingdom: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon.co.uk

AUAustralia: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon.com.au

CACanada: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon.ca

DEDeutschland: Finde andere Technik- und Computerprodukte wie dieses auf Amazon.de

Jon joined the TweakTown team in 2013 and has since reviewed 100s of new storage products. Jon became a computer enthusiast when Windows XP launched. He was into water cooling and benching ATI video cards with modded drivers. Jon has been building computers for others for more than 10 years. Jon became a storage enthusiast the day he first booted an Intel X25-M G1 80GB SSD. Look for Jon to bring consumer SSD reviews into the spotlight.

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