Now just as a disclaimer, this isn’t a standard SSD review. I will be doing a review and a comparison between the Crucial BX200 480GB SSD and my normal SATA HDD, which in this case, is a Seagate Maxtor DiamondMax 23 500GB, both being used in a SATAII port. This means that the SSD is running in a 3Gbit/s port when it would perform better in a SATAIII, 6Gbit/s port, so if you’re a tech nerd and think that the technical results in this review are a little under par, that is why.
I have wanted an SSD for quite some time now, so I jumped at the chance to review this beauty. Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the cutting edge new storage drives in PCs that contain no moving parts, making them able to read and write data much faster than the conventional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). Since they don’t contain a moving arm to read the disk, similar to a record player for example, this makes them faster, quieter, smaller and for now, a lot more expensive. The Crucial BX200 comes in at around $129-$150 for 480GB (actual size 446GB), whereas a 500GB HDD – actual size 465GB – you can get for about $40-$60, which is a HUGE difference… but is it worth it?
Generally speaking with everyday use, most of the time you aren’t going to notice a lot of difference. You will see that icons and folders will open a lot faster, and the biggest difference by far is easily the boot time. Using the HDD, my PC took 2 minutes and 30 seconds to boot, but with the Crucial BX200 it only took me 36 seconds, which is a dramatic improvement. If you are someone who moves around a lot of data, constantly installs and uninstalls software, backing up or restoring your OS more often etc. then an SSD upgrade will be very valuable to you. It’s also a very useful drive if you dabble in video creation, such as for YouTube, as your software will render footage and compile videos at a faster rate depending on your other components as well. Of course, a huge audience for SSD hard drives are gamers. Video games are growing in size year by year, with titles like Grand Theft Auto V totaling at 65GBs, with a huge game world and high end graphics. The speeds you can get from the BX200 can make your games initially boot faster and reduce load times, making waiting for action a lot more bearable! Below I have taken the brand new PC game, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and compared the boot times, entering the game times and load times between travelling to different areas of the game. Unfortunately the hard drive I was testing against the SSD died during the process of this review… so I only have the Crucial BX200’s results.
Now for all you techy nerds out there, I’ve included tests showing all of the speed results that both drives offer. The red graphs are the main figures however, as the read speed is how quick data can be loaded, and the write speed is how quick it can be saved to the drive. As you can see there is a HUGE difference between the two drives, and as you can imagine, the SSD being in it’s preferred SATAIII would perform even better than this.
Here is the write and read test using the Crucial BX200:
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CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 x64 (C) 2007-2016 hiyohiyo
Other Results
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* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 27.841 MB/s [ 6797.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 81.284 MB/s [ 19844.7 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 231.724 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 227.333 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 24.177 MB/s [ 5902.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 47.216 MB/s [ 11527.3 IOPS]
Test : 1024 MiB [E: 56.0% (250.2/446.7 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/02/06 23:42:18
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 10586] (x64)
Here is the write and read test using the Seagate HDD:
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CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 x64 (C) 2007-2016 hiyohiyo
Other Results
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* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.518 MB/s [ 126.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.764 MB/s [ 186.5 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 75.909 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 56.828 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.279 MB/s [ 68.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.787 MB/s [ 192.1 IOPS]
Test : 1024 MiB [C: 55.4% (257.6/465.3 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/02/06 23:35:17
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 10586] (x64)
So with this SSD, tasking jobs and even trivial tasks are done much faster, letting you get on with your other tasks, gaming, or finishing your application process without having to wait around. This would be if the SSD performed at these speeds constantly. However, I did notice something that seems to be a huge issue. Below I have taken a screenshot as I was moving a large game to my HDD from the SSD in Windows 10. As you can see, the transfer speed was peaking at about 190MB/s, but after about 3GBs of data had transferred, it suddenly dropped down to about 70MB/s. I have no idea why this happens, but I looked online to ensure it wasn’t an error on my side and there are many other sources confirming the same issue. This makes moving and writing files after the first few gigabytes only slightly faster than using a standard hard drive!
The BX200 480GB SSD is a good value and large drive, but this drop in speed is a crucial mistake in it’s performance. We also reviewed the Crucial BX100, found here, which might be a better choice over what is supposed to be the improved version. Maybe this doesn’t happen with all BX200 drives? It’s possible, but I wouldn’t recommend it over that risk; it’s a staple that all SSDs should be able to perform no matter what.
In comparison to a standard HDD however, it certainly performs and demonstrates why they are basked in glory by the PC community. If you’re unable to get your hands on the Crucial BX100, then it may be best to research more about the Crucial BX200 before purchasing one; that’s unless you can get one a lot cheaper than the RRP. It is a useful drive due to it’s size and ability to load your OS and applications a lot faster. It’s just that the drop in write speed is very disappointing.
A BX200 was provided by Crucial for the purpose of this review