Packaging and Closer Look
If you have purchased an SSD from Crucial before, you will notice that the style and packaging is generally the same. The BX100 and MX200‘s box has the blue as its dominant color. This time, with the BX200, it’s the white which is the dominant color. Nevertheless, the presentation is more or less the same. You’ll get a decent square box that houses the SSD and accessories, if any. It’s nothing too fancy or poorly packaged.
Inside the small square box contains the BX200 960GB SSD, a 7mm to 9.5mm spacer and an Acronis True Image HD Software activation key. You will have to download the software itself, but using the included activation key will give you full access to the software. The Acronis True Image HD is basically a cloning software that lets you copy all the data on your existing storage drive to the BX200 SSD. This is handy specially if you do not want to redo everything, starting from installing the OS from scratch, installing all the software and app and migrating your files. I won’t go into details on how to use the software and how to migrate your files in this review since that is a whole new topic.
Again, the physical appearance of the BX200 SSD is identical with its predecessor. You get the same BX sticker design in front, and you also get some information about the SSD at the back.
Just like its predecessor, the housing of the BX200 SSD doesn’t have any screws. It’s using a clip mechanism to lock the upper and bottom lid together. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to open this SSD. I don’t know why, but its housing was sealed tight compared to the previous samples I got from Crucial. I could have forced my way into it, but it would bend the sides of the housing and I do not want to ruin its aluminum shell.
PCB of a Crucial BX100 500GB SSD
The photo you see above is the PCB of the Crucial BX100 500GB SSD. The layout and the arrangement of the chips on the PCB are almost identical with the new BX200 SSD. On the top portion, you see the 8 Micron TLC NAND chips (64GB each), and another 8 at the back. There’s also the Silicon Motion SM2256 controller located at the middle portion near the SATA connector. And on top of the controller, there are two Micron LPDDR3 DRAM, 512MB each, for a total of 1GB cache.
Crucial Storage Executive Software
Aside from the Acronis Image Utility included in the package, you will also be able to use Crucial’s proprietary software called the Storage Executive. The installer is not included in the package. You will have to download this software from Crucial’s page here. Do note that the Storage Executive is a web-based utility and you will need a browser to use it.
The Crucial Storage Executive lets you view the status and details of the storage drive(s) installed on your system; you can check a drive’s SMART status; and you can update the firmware of a Crucial SSD if there is a new one. You can also Sanitize a drive or in other words secure erase a Crucial SSD, change the over provisioning and activate the Momentum Cache feature.
The Momentum Cache feature is similar to Samsung’s Rapid Mode or Plextor’s Flex Turbo, in a sense that it increases the SSD’s burst performance significantly and extends its life by reducing redundant writes. It will make use of your system’s DDR memory as a cache, thus the speed and stability of your system’s memory will also play role when this feature is activated.
The Crucial Storage Executive is compatible with Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 / 10, and supports Crucial MX-series, BX-series, M550, and M500 SSDs.
Now let’s proceed to the next page for our test setup and see how the Crucial BX200 960GB SSD performs on our system.
