FEATURED Crucial MX100 512GB SSD - MU01 firmware

[Woomack]

Since I got one of the latest Crucial MX100 512GB SSD then I thought I will share with some results.

Crucial MX100 is in quite good price for a new SSD series. 512GB version is available on the neweeg.com for about $215.
Crucial is offering 3 year warranty for MX100 series SSD.

MX100 is using Marvell 88SS9189 controller and the latest 16nm NAND ( probably as the only manufacturer on the market ).
Tests were performed on the Rampage IV Extreme motherboard ( Intel SATA3 ports ) and i7 4930K@4GHz.

Now let's take a look at some results.


ATTO Disk Benchmark




ATTO performs only sequential read and write tests but is good to show what is maximum bandwidth of the drive.
Declared max bandwidth is up to 550MB/s read and 500MB/s write. Here we see slightly below 550MB/s read and 513MB/s write so in general it looks good.


AS SSD Benchmark




AS SSD and next two benchmarks are showing also random transfers what is more important in daily work. I don't have to explain that to most forum members as these benchmarks are well known.


Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.1




4K read bandwidth looks really good. Not many SSD can make more than ~30MB/s in this test.


Anvil's Storage Utilities




PCMark8



PCMark8 is really long test. It takes over 1h on nearly every SSD. Results are also mix of random and sequential transfers so numbers are not as high as some may expect but are showing real daily usage of the storage. I think it's probably the best test to compare SSD in your daily work.

I hope there will be new firmware which improves above results. So far it's a new product which comes with MU01 firmware. Anyway, I think these SSD are really good and price is reasonable. Many slower drives cost more and we have to remember that Crucial has also a great support in case of any issues. Of course we hope that nothing will happen with our drive but no one knows.


Feel free to comment or add your results on MX100.

Full review can be found here:
http://funkykit.com/90-reviews/storage/1209-crucial-mx100-512gb-ssd-review

 

[HankB]

Thanks for the review. I may be in the market for a new SSD in the near future. I'm hoping to adopt my D-I-L's retired macbook to have a go at IOS development. My son has suggested that it would benefit from an upgrade to an SSD. I'm not sure this will be a 'high use' machine so I'm reluctant to spend $$$ for the bestest and fastest SSD. Nevertheless, it would be nice to have something decently fast that will likely be reliable. It seems that the MX100 fits that niche, though I would probably go with the 128 GB version.

Do you have any idea how the smaller one stacks up? I understand that some smaller siblings use fewer internal data paths and thus have less throughput.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Hank, looking at specs online it seems that the reads stay roughly the same, but the writes take a pretty hard hit on the 128GB model.

 

[EarthDog]

As is generally, but not always, typical.

 

[Woomack]

Usually read stays the same while writes are lower on lower capacity SSD. However most important in daily work is read speed and random transfers.
As I remember then only 512GB and 1TB SSD had the same performance in some series. Almost all 120/128 and 250/256GB were slower in writes. There was also one 512GB or 480GB which was slightly slower than 250/256GB but I don't remember what series was it.
Re Crucial, they're based on Marvell controllers and all Marvells have higher writes at higher SSD capacity.

MX100 has one of the highest random read transfers. I've seen maybe 4 SATA SSD on the market with random 4K read above 30MB/s in CDM or AS SSD and 2 of them were based on this new Marvell controller.

 

[Mpegger]

Usually read stays the same while writes are lower on lower capacity SSD. However most important in daily work is read speed and random transfers.
As I remember then only 512GB and 1TB SSD had the same performance in some series. Almost all 120/128 and 250/256GB were slower in writes. There was also one 512GB or 480GB which was slightly slower than 250/256GB but I don't remember what series was it.
Re Crucial, they're based on Marvell controllers and all Marvells have higher writes at higher SSD capacity.

MX100 has one of the highest random read transfers. I've seen maybe 4 SATA SSD on the market with random 4K read above 30MB/s in CDM or AS SSD and 2 of them were based on this new Marvell controller.

One of the articles I read about the MX100 stated something about a "raid like" setup to the NAND, which is what allows the higher capacity SSDs to write faster.