Crucial BX100 500GB SSD Review – A Best Value SSD

Crucial’s latest lineup of SSD or Solid State Drives includes the new MX200 series and the BX100 series. The MX200 are basically their high performance line of SSD featuring speeds of up to 555 MB/s read, 500 MB/s write. Meanwhile the BX100 is geared towards the budget conscious system builders and for those who are looking for an affordable solution when upgrading from a hard disk drive to a solid state drive. The Crucial BX100 is a bit slower compared to the MX200, with sequential read and write speeds of up to 535 MB/s and 450 MB/s respective, but comes with a much affordable price tag. In this review, we are going to look at the 500GB capacity BX100 SSD.

Crucial BX100 500GB SSD Review

The Crucial BX100 SSD series features Silicon Motion’s SM2246EN SSD controller that supports Micron’s 16nm 128Gb MLC NAND flash that are ideal for high performance and high capacity SSD solutions up to 1TB. The SM2246EN controller is able to handle sequential read speeds of up to 538MB/s and sequential writes speeds of up to 450MB/s. Those speeds are pretty much the rated speed of the BX100 SSD (500GB and 1TB variant).

Crucial claims that the BX100 is 15x faster than today’s best-selling internal hard drive. They compared a 1TB Crucial BX100 SSD vs a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue WD10EZEX using PCMark Vantage HDD test suite. 15x or not, an SSD is indeed faster than a typical hard disk drive (even the fastest hard drive). The BX100 is rated to have sequential read speeds of up to 535MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 450 MB/s on all file types. It’s also rated to have a Random read/write speeds of up to 90,000 / 87,000 IOPS on all file types respective. Whether these rated speeds are true or not, we will soon find out in our test results.

The Crucial BX100 SSD includes advanced features such as thermal monitoring, Data Path Protection, Active Garbage Collection, TURM support, SMART or Self-Monitoring and Reporting Technology and ECC or Error Correction Code. Other features of the BX100 SSD includes 1.5 million hours of life expectancy and an endurance of 72TB total bytes written, which is equivalent to 40GB per day for 5 years.

The BX100 SSD series are available in 4 difference capacities: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB and 1TB, and are back with a limited 3-year warranty from the company. Please do note that although these SSDs belong to the same series, the different capacities do not have the same read/write speeds. The lower capacities, like the 120GB and 250GB, have a slower write speeds compared to the 500GB and 1TB variants. I’ll discuss more of its features as we take a closer look on the SSD itself.

Crucial BX100 500GB SSD Specifications