The benefits on a solid state drive are incredible. You’d be surprised at just how much of a performance gain you can see by installing one. Gaming, OS boot times, and much more can be drastically improved with the help of an SSD. Someone once described having a beastly PC without an SSD as “Driving a Ferrari like a Fiat 500.” Finding an SSD can be a daunting task for a PC builder. Personally, purchasing an SSD often feels nonsensical to me. The average size of a program or game these days cannot allow for minimal capacity drives. Capacity to price is always a concern too, I doubt many people want to rinse their wallets for a new solid state drive.
Enter the BX100 from Crucial, an SSD that not only provides excellent performance but does so at a cheap cost. With numerous models ranging from 120GB through 250GB and 500GB to a huge 1TB, without a doubt the BX100 is one of the best value SSDs on the market. Though its not the fastest drive out there, it certainly packs a punch at a very gracious price. For 500GB alone the BX100 only costs £125 (UK Sept 2015).
All tests were carried out using: i7 4790K, GTX 970, WD Black 1TB (Comparison drive).
The BX100–B standing for “Budget”–is a small and powerful drive. It features “Extreme energy efficiency,” which drops energy consumption to 90% less than your average hard drive, according to Crucial. It’s based off the 16nm NAND by Micron which is one of the smallest around. It does, however, make a few trade-offs. It doesn’t feature 256-bit AES hardware encryption and power-loss protection like some of its counterparts. The small 2.5″ drive fits snugly inside SSD trays on the H440 case.
There’s only one reason to buy an SSD. You want pure, insane performance from your storage; You want your OS to boot fast; You want your games to launch faster than before and load smoothly and quickly. With the BX100 you get exactly that. The BX100 is perfect for gamers looking for a good solid state drive without excessive prices. Below are some statistics from CrystalDiskMark and comparisons with a Western Digital 1TB black drive (the norm for PC gamers).
CrystalDiskMark:
Now for some Battlefield 4/3 game loading comparisons. Time measuring was started from the second it appeared in the windows taskbar. It’s safe to say the use of an SSD makes life a lot easier in demanding games. The game launches faster and loads the map significantly faster, too. I was always slow to join games previously, but now with use of the BX100, I was one of the first in the game and got small perks, like access to vehicles before anyone else.
On some smaller, less demanding titles the SSD can load the game and load individual maps almost instantly. When loading an operating system, it took roughly 20 seconds, including all of my start-up apps such as Corsair Link. Essentially, this SSD will absolutely destroy most games performance-wise. I found myself being the first to load in consistently on multiple games. It made my relatively good HDD seem slow and old. Editing videos using adobe applications is also much faster. The software itself loads faster and the exports are written to the drive faster too, reducing overall time spent waiting around.
The BX100 does many things right and few things wrong. In day-to-day use and gaming use, it performs phenomenally. Price-per-gigabyte is what really matters here. Since most PC builders look to save where possible and get the best value for their money, the BX100 is a strong contender. The BX100 is affordable for great capacities; £125 (At the time of writing) for a 500GB solid state drive of this quality is fantastic–a 1TB model will only cost your £130 more. 500GB is enough to handle your OS and some games or to entirely dedicate to applications and games. Its cost to capacity ratio makes the BX100 a worthwhile investment. “Higher-end” SSDs, such as the Samsung 850, cost much more for relatively similar performance. The only reason to potentially not get the BX100 is if you are looking for extreme performance levels. However, there is no strong weakness to this SSD–Nothing to fault or really complain about, making that price tag even more appealing.
The BX100 is a cheap, fantastic SSD and a worthwhile investment that offers competitive gaming and day-to-day performance. The big difference is that it doesn’t come with the price of a top line SSD. If you’re looking to build a PC on a budget but want a decent capacity level, the BX100 is certainly for you. If you want an SSD that can launch your OS fast and handle applications at pace, the BX100 is for you.
I could never justify to myself extensive spending on an SSD that lacked capacity, but the BX100 is one of the first SSDs that offers top-end performance for budget prices. If you were like me and didn’t fancy burning your wallet for minimal capacity, this may just be a worthy investment. Due to its price-to-performance I am awarding the BX100 with a gold “Best value” award from BagoGames.
A BX100 was provided by Crucial for this review