Crucial BX200 SSD Review (480GB/960GB)

REAL WORLD FILE TRANSFER

Finally, we wanted to see how performance was in a real world use when transferring large files to the SSDs. As we know, the BX200 utilizes an SLC caching algorithm to help improve performance, especially writes. This is needed due to the inherent slowness of TLC NAND. For this test we are going to simply transfer over a 30GB folder of movies off of one SSD to this one and time how long it takes. Once complete we can calculate the average speed.

In this test it is clear that the BX200 is lagging behind the many mainstream drives. Not only is it, but so are the 480GB OCZ Trion 100 and 120GB Samsung 850 EVO. Overall, we can see that the BX200 can’t even keep up with a HDD with such a large transfer. Past the buffer speeds drop down significantly. While the average of the whole transfer is displayed above, we saw as low as 80MB/s. So, this test just goes to show, if you are one who does heavy write workloads and large file transfers often, stay away from these entry-level drives.

POWER CONSUMPTION

For our power consumption testing, we have the drive connected to the system as a secondary drive. To record the wattage, we are now utilizing a Quarch Technology Programmable Power Module. It allows us to accurately measure power consumption over time and is flexible enough to allow us to test any SSD that comes our way.

Our power analysis may change as time goes on, but for now we are looking at just a few metrics with the main goal of measuring our results against the manufacturer’s ratings. One, idle power consumption. Because most consumer systems are at idle for about 80% of the time, idle power consumption is an important measure to look at when understanding the efficiency of a drive. Next we look at startup consumption. This tells you how much power the device needs during startup and while it is usually more important when looking at HDDs and enterprise class storage, it is still something worth quantifying. After that we did averaged out the active power consumption from the 30GB file transfer. Finally, we went through our power logs during testing and listed the maximum power draw.

In terms of power consumption, Crucial states that the BX200 is a bit more power efficient over the previous model in terms of idle (0.065W vs 0.1W) and DevSleep (0.015 vs 0.010W), however, the active max power consumption is slightly higher at 4.2W vs 4W.

In our testing we have seen slightly different results. At idle we can see that the BX200 is very good, the 480GB capacity consumes just 35mW while the 960GB consumes only a bit more at 45mW due to the extra NAND and DRAM packages. Our active power consumption when transferring the 30GB of test files averaged out to 3.9 and 4.28W per the 480GB and 960GB capacity respectively. The maximum consumption recorded throughout testing was a bit over 6W each.

Finally, we wanted to post up a graph of the difference between many of the current SSD options in the market. Again, idle accounts for the majority power draw of a drive, therefore we feel we should compare it. In the chart above we can see that SSDs are magnitudes more efficient than standard HDDs. The BX200 drives are among the lowest in the comparison, which is a nice plus. Also, compared to the BX100, the BX200 does indeed consume less power at idle.