Crucial BX300 240GB SSD Drive Review

Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers can change depending on what hardware is being tested.  These were recorded using Sandra Professional Version 24.50.2017.11

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a freeware disk benchmarking utility that can test a variety of storage solutions from single hard drives to multi level RAID arrays and solid state disks.  The tests can be broken down to transfer sizes between 512B to 64MB with lengths between 64KB and 32GB.  Testing results are shown on a transfer chart with reads and writes clearly marked.

For our benchmark the 64MB transfer is being recorded.

Crystal Disk Mark is a widely available disk benchmarking program that can test a variety of different scenarios from Sequential to Random with Multiple and Single queues.

For our tests the Sequential and Random test with multiple queues and threads will be recorded.

PCMark 10 is an overall system benchmark to measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. Similar to 3DMark this new version tests the entire system as a whole using applications that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office.  This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be apparent to end users and consumers.

SYSmark 2014 SE is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation, and data/financial analysis and features the latest and most popular applications from each of their respective fields.  This is a Second Edition release to the popular SYSmark 2014 that works better with Windows 10.    

As expected the Crucial BX300 drive performed quite well and matched the performance of the faster HyperX 3K.  Of course benchmarks like this really only confirm what you can see when reading the specifications sheet leaving us to hunt deeper for the subtle differences between the drives.  What I find interesting is that the BX300 is actually faster than the older MX300 and designed to be a mainstream alternative.  Of course it is only available in capacities up to 480GB which illustrates one of the major differences.

The important thing to note is that even with the density increase of 3D NAND the overall performance is still comparable to the older planar NAND and with a much cheaper pricetag.