Crucial MX100 (256GB & 512GB) Review

AnandTech Storage Bench 2013

Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based - we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we are testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes. I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.

We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the test workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we have been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.

Quite surprisingly, the MX100 is slightly faster than the M550 in our 2013 Storage Bench. The differences are not significant, but it's still surprising given that M550 is supposed to be Crucial's higher performing drive. Especially at 256GB this is odd because the M550 has lower capacity NAND that should result in more parallelism and thus more performance, but that doesn't seem to be that case. I'm guessing that Crucial has been able to tweak the firmware to unleash more performance from the Marvell 9189 controller, which would explain why the MX100 is faster than the M550. Then again, the ADATA SP920 with 128Gbit NAND and Micron designed firmware is also faster than the 256GB M550, so it looks like M550 doesn't take full advantage of the lower capacity NAND.