Crucial MX200 SSD Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅25-05-15
Conclusion
SSDs have reached a performance threshold which none based on the SATA interface appears capable to cross. This is of course not a fault of Crucial as they are simply doing the best they possibly can with the protocols they have to work with but with PCIe technology and especially NVMe now becoming much more common place we can't help feeling that SATA based technology is becoming obsolete - at least in terms of ultimate performance. It wasn't so long ago that having an SSD was a luxury. Then an SSD became labelled as the single best upgrade you could make to a PC. Now they are commonplace and to this end the companies who produce them have invested millions to the point the market is now saturated with it being increasingly difficult to differentiate one drive from another, at least in terms of performance. Most manufacturers are instead concentrating their efforts on adding features which are welcome additions but are much of a muchness when each has their own feature set that mirrors another but named differently. Crucial have the advantage of using their own MICRON NAND, which allows them to produce dedicated firmware to best utilise this NAND.

Running an SSD, in this case our 1TB version is much more power efficient than for example, running an equivalent mechanical hard drive and Crucial also claim (although we couldn't verify) that the MX200 has higher endurance by up to 5 times than 3 other popular drives in the market from Samsung, Corsair and Intel. Crucial's Redundant Array of Independent NAND (RAIN) technology is also utilised in this product and the MX200 also puts our mind at ease by giving us four layers of data protection against file corruption. The drive also encompasses AES 256-bit encryption and meets all industry encryption standards, including Microsoft® eDrive, IEEE-1667, and TCG Opal 2.0. So what's not to like?



Crucial have made every effort to make their latest MX200 drive as attractive to the public as possible. It looks great, priced fairly and performs very well so there is little to criticise for what is in effect a very good SSD. Crucial would be the first to admit that they have concentrated more on features rather than outright performance with this drive so the average performance (albeit still very fast) can be forgiven. If we had one area we would like to see improved is the warranty. While 3 years is the industry standard these days we are seeing some drives that come with a 5 year warranty. That said, it is only a minor observation which is outweighed by the other features the MX200 offers. With this in mind we have no issues in recommending the MX200. It doesn't score our highest accolade with us because it doesn't do quite enough to differentiate itself from other drives on the market in terms of raw performance but it does get our Gold award because when all aspects are considered this is a very impressive SSD and one which we would happily use in our own system.

In summary:
With a splendid array of features, the MX200 offers much more than just raw performance.

Pros
+ Reliability Features
+ Power efficient
+ Solid IOPs performance

Cons
- Average sequential read/write performance



Thanks to EBUYER for providing today's sample.


Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.


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