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Review: Crucial Reviewed by: ANTONIS Provided by: Crucial Model: BX100 1000GB SSD Firmware version: MU01
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SATA 6Gbps reached its limits a long time
ago, so finding the fastest drive out there should not be an issue. But what
happens when you try to find the fastest drive at an affordable price? This is
where things can get interesting.
Crucial’s BX100 SSD is a drive that aims to
find itself in your laptop or desktop, for those people that look for the best of
both worlds. As expected the cost needs to be kept low and Crucial has decided
to use the Silicon Motion controller with NAND that is manufactured by micron.
The question now is what can the BX100 SSD
achieve? Before I start the review let me point you to the direction of the
official Crucial website so that you can find out more about the Crucial BX100 SSD and
also about Crucial.
Now let’s take a look at the package, its
contents and the drive.
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD
Let’s start by taking a look at the package
and the contents of the Crucial BX100 SSD. We'll start with the package.
Here
is the front of the Crucial BX100 box,
and
the back of the box.
The bottom
side of the Crucial BX100 SSD.
Here is the top side of the drive.
Now let’s look at what’s inside the SSD.
Looking at the top of the Crucial BX100 SSD
we find eight NAND chips and also the RAM. We can also see the way that the
hard drive fixed to the chassis, I would prefer to see screws but it does a
good job holding the PCB to the chassis.
On
the back of the Crucial BX100 SSD we find the Silicon Motion controller, the
RAM chip and another eight NAND chips.
A
closer look at the NAND,
and the
Silicon Mortion SM2296EN controller.
Specifications of the BX100 1TB SSD
In the pictures below we can see a more
detailed view of the performance of the BX100 SSD series and form factors.
As we can see the Crucial BX100 is only
available in the SATA 2.5” form factor and also in four capacities, 120GB,
250GB, 500GB, and 1TB. As we can see endurance is still very high, 40GB per day for five years. This makes me wonder why Crucial didn’t update their warranty to five years, as it would have made the BX100 SSD even more attractive.
CrystalDiskInfo
In
the above screenshot we see all the available info for the Crucial BX100 SSD.
Let’s head to the next page where we
take a look at our testing methods and the review PC.
Test machine
For this review I will be using a computer
with the following configuration:
Hardware:
- Motherboard: ASUS X99-A (Intel X99 chipset)
- Processor: Intel Core i7 5280K @ 4.4GHz
- RAM: Crucial 4x4GB 2133MHz DDR4
- GFX: MSI 6670 1GB
- Sound: Onboard Realtek HD audio
controller - OS SSD: Kingston V300 240GB
- PSU: Seasonic 750W
- Display: Futsiju Siemens 22”
- Operating System: Windows 8.1
The Crucial BX100 1000GB SSD was connected
to the Intel native SATA 6Gbps (port 1) on the X99 motherboard of our review PC
and all tests on the drive were carried out with the drive connected to this port.
All power saving features were disabled during all of my synthetic benchmarks.
AHCI mode was also selected for all drives
in the UEFI of our test PC, and all the tests were carried out in this mode. As
we can also see the formatted size of the Crucial BX100 SSD is 932GB.
The SATA 6Gbps drivers used on our review
PC were Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) Version 13.1.0.1058.
Test applications
To test the performance of the Crucial BX100
1000GB SSD, I will be using the following test applications in this review.
- HD Tune
Pro - ATTO
- Iometer
- AS SSD
Benchmark - CrystalDiskMark
- Anvil’s
Storage Utilities - PCMark
Test procedures
I will start off our testing procedures
explanation by stating that I did not run many synthetic benchmarks on the Crucial
BX100 SSD. You may ask why I have run so few synthetic benchmarks.
SSD technology has moved so fast in the
last couple of years, that basic synthetic benchmarks alone are now of very
limited use, as they don't really tell us much about performance and how the
drive will behave in the real world. I have therefore decided to show some
basic benchmarks for the Crucial BX100 SSD, and will complement this with
advanced benchmarks using IOMeter and AS SSD benchmark. I will also show how
the Crucial BX100 SSD performs in the real world.
The reality of SSD performance
While I can easily show you which SSD is
technically the faster, when you use one of these modern SSDs as an operating
system drive it becomes very difficult to tell them apart as far as performance
is concerned.
A typical use of a small capacity SSD at
the moment is to have your operating system and applications installed onto the
SSD. The performance difference compared to a traditional HDD is enormous,
however when you start to compare SSD to SSD the difference becomes almost
impossible to detect.
Let’s look at why this is the case.
Drive A can boot to the desktop in 8.11
seconds, and drive B can boot to the desktop in 8.12 seconds, the difference in
time is milliseconds, and can one really tell the difference?
The fact is, all modern SSDs are only
ticking over when they are only running the OS and launching applications, it’s
only when you get to some of the larger capacity SSDs, with enough free space
to be able to hold the actual data that you’re going to be working with, be
that video, audio or pictures, for example, that you actually get a tangible
difference in performance. This is where the SSDs with the better sequential
performance start to pull well ahead of the SSDs which have lower sequential
read/write performance.
Small file random IOPS vs sequential performance
IOPS
This is a fairly complex subject, but I
will do my best to explain things in a manner that is easy to understand.
The term IOPS is the amount of input or
output transactions that can take place in a one second interval, so for
example, if an SSD is quoted as being able to cope with 20,000 4K random write
IOPS, then the SSD should be able to cope with 20,000 input transactions in a
period of one second. If the same SSD is said to be able to produce 20,000 4K
random read IOPS, then the same SSD should be able to produce 20,000 4K random
read output transactions in a one second interval.
Ok, now we have some figures to work with,
the next question is how many IOPS are actually required?
This will depend on your usage pattern. If
you are a typical desktop user who browses the internet, does some word
processing or perhaps some audio or video editing, and perhaps plays a few
games, then in actual fact, you don’t need to have massive 4K random read/write
performance. The actual amount of 4K random performance that is required for a
fast and smooth running system for a desktop user with a usage pattern similar to
the above will be well under 1,000 4K IOPS.
On the other hand, if the SSD is being used
for running a large and complex database server, then 4K random performance is
the absolute measurement of how fast that server will run, as this type of
application does most of its input and output transactions in the 4K domain.
So why would I need an SSD with 80,000 4K
IOPS for a desktop?
In fact you don’t need this type of
performance for a desktop, but an SSD which is capable of coping with 80,000 4K
IOPS will be faster than an SSD which can only cope with 20,000 4K IOPS.
OK, I just said if under 1,000 4K IOPS are
actually required for typical desktop usage, why is an SSD with 80,000 4K IOPS
faster than an SSD with only 20,000 4K IOPS, confused?
You may ask, if I only require 1,000 4K
IOPS surely the rest is wasted?
While you may never need 80,000 4K IOPS,
IOPS is all about latency. The reason that an SSD can cope with as much as 80,000
4K IOPS is because latency in this domain is very low. With 4K files, even if
you require to process 500 of them at the same time, you are not talking about
a huge amount of data, it has far more to do with how long it takes the SSD to
process a single file, and the amount of time required to process a single 4K
is all about how long it takes for the SSD to access or store that data before
it can move on to the next transaction.
In other words an SSD with 80,000 4K IOPS
performance will handle those 500 files faster than the SSD with 20,000 IOPS.
So how will a desktop user even notice this
faster speed if so little 4K random IOPS and data are actually used?
Multitasking is a good example. The more
tasks you run at the same time, you more you will notice the speed difference.
Sequential performance
I have always maintained that sequential
performance was every bit as important as small random file performance for a
desktop SSD. Some highly regarded people on other sites found this statement
quite funny a couple of years ago when I made it, but my, how times have
changed in the world of SSD reviewing.
To me this was always so obvious for a
desktop user. For example, let’s say you want to launch an application or game.
Both have some fairly large files to load, and also a great many small files,
but the point is, even the smaller files are sequential in nature. Now let’s
say you’re into audio or video editing. Video files tend to be huge, and the
files are written or read sequentially. Isn’t this how many users are using
their PCs these days?
Summary
So how does this shape up in the real world?
Which is better, massive 4K IOPS or massive sequential performance?
In an ideal world you want both, as an SSD
with massive random 4K IOPS and sequential performance will always be faster
than an SSD that has high sequential performance and moderate 4K random IOPS
performance, and the same applies to an SSD that has massive 4K random
performance and moderate sequential performance. The SSD which has high
performance in both patterns will always be the faster SSD.
However, you can still have an SSD that is
very fast for desktop use that has moderate random 4K performance and massive
sequential performance, the same can be said about a drive having massive
random 4K performance and moderate sequential performance, as it is about
getting the balance right if you have to compromise on one or the other.
Drive preparation for running the tests
All the SSDs used in this article were in a
clean and fresh state when the testing period started. From then on, each drive
had to rely on its own NAND cleaning effectiveness for the remainder of the
tests.
- Both our spinning HDD drives were
defragged before the start of each test.
- All SSD and HDD used in this article had
their partitions aligned to the Windows 7 x64 defaults.
Where I use graphs in this article to
display results, I will use the following colours to make it easier, for our
readers to see which drive we are reviewing.
Crucial BX100 1000GB
SSD
Comparison SSD
Now let's head to the next page, where I
look at some basic benchmarks...
Reading Benchmarks
HD Tune
HD Tune – Sequential reading test
I present the graph below for comparison
with other recently tested drives.
The Crucial BX100 gave a very impressive
result of 450.9 MB/Sec, 11MB/Sec faster than the Crucial M550 is something that
I didn't expect to see.
ATTO disk benchmark
ATTO has become a standard tool for
measuring the data throughput of HDDs and SSDs. It measures the reading and
writing performance, using different file sizes and block sizes.
Crucial BX100 SSD had no problems reaching its
maximum read and write speeds, 453MB/Sec for write, and 560MB/Sec for the read
speed.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0
CrystalDiskMark is quite a handy
benchmarking application, as it focuses on the file sizes that can cause a
problem on a system drive.
Crucials BX100 was again able to give very
impressive results , especially with sequential data, however the 4K test results
are as expected lower than for the top drives.
The two graphs below will give a more
detailed view of how the Crucial BX100 compares with other SSDs that I have
re-tested.
Here I present the graph for the read speed
tests. You can compare the Crucial BX100 SSD with other drives that I have
tested.
I will continue by presenting the graph for
the write speed tests for the Crucial BX100. You can compare the Crucial BX100
SSD with other tested drives.
The Crucial BX100 gave an outstanding
performance for sequential read speeds, and it was very fast with sequential
write speed. However the 4K results shows that some compromises were made to
the BX100 so that it can achieve a lower price. Overall though the result is
still very good.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD benchmark is a benchmarking tool
specifically designed to test SSDs. The application tests sequential reading
and writing performance, 4K random reading and writing performance.
AS SSD benchmark also tests 4K threaded
performance. This is very exciting, as this test is the first available test
that I am aware of, that simulates how a PC operating system actually works. A
modern PC and OS, such as Windows Vista/7 does not just run a single thread at
a time, it runs many threads. The AS SSD benchmark "4K 64Thrd" tests
run 64 threads simultaneously throughout the test. If this result is good, then
you can be pretty sure the drive will perform extremely well as a system drive.
After the tests complete, AS SSD benchmark
derives a total score for the drive being tested. This is based on all aspects
of the test results, and gives an indication of how the drive is performing
overall.
Now let’s look at the results for the Crucial
BX100 SSD in the form of a screenshot. All our other comparison drives’ results
are presented in the form of a graph.
It was expected that the Crucial BX100 SSD
would not be able to top this test, but it’s able to be close to the Crucial
MX200, an SSD that is not considered a value drive.
Let's head to the next page and run some
tests using PCMark .....
PCMark Vantage - HDD Suite
For these tests we will be using
FutureMark’s PCMark Vantage. This suite of real world test applications is
highly regarded, as one of the most comprehensive ways of testing a computer’s
performance in the real world. The PCMark Vantage test application also
includes an HDD/SSD/USB Flash suite of testing procedures, designed to fully
test the performance of an HDD/SSD to its limits.
PCMark Vantage HDD suite results
Here
I present the results for the Crucial BX100 1000GB SSD.
A more detailed view of the performance of
the Crucial BX100 1000GB SSD, as we can see the Crucial BX100 is giving mixed
results, topping some parts of the test, but not all.
The score for the Crucial BX100 SSD was
81075 and so far this is the best result that I have obtained in this test.
PC Mark 8 - HDD Suite
We have built quite a close relationship
with FutureMark software, the authors of the PCMark PC benchmarking software
that we use in our tests. I decided I would use PCMark Vantage as stopgap
measure until the more up-to-date PCMark 8 benchmarking suite became available.
I'm pleased to say that PCMark 8 is now available, and it gives me great
pleasure to introduce you all to the results obtained by this new 'real world'
benchmarking suite.
I will describe the basic way that each
test is carried out, above the graph for each test.
PC Mark 8 HDD suite results
Here
is a screenshot displaying the results for the Crucial BX100 1TB SSD.
249.89MB/Sec for the Crucial BX100 1TB SSD
and a spot in the middle for the drive.
Not the fastest result for the Crucial
BX100 SSD, 70.8 seconds, only 0.4 seconds slower than the fastest drive but
that enough to give it third place from the end.
Here the Crucial BX100 SSD is occupying the
middle of the chart, with only 0.5 Seconds from the fastest drives that I
tested.
Again we continue to see that the Crucial
BX100 SSD sits in the middle of the chart.
72 seconds, that's how long it took for the
Crucial BX100 SSD to complete this task.
Nothing out of the ordinary, again the
Crucial BX100 SSD is in the middle of the chart.
Crucial's BX100 SSD again shows nice
performance but not good enough to beat the fastest other drives.
Only 0.1 second slower than the Crucial MX200
SSD, still that result keeps the BX100 SSD in the middle of the chart.
A very acceptable performance from the
Crucial BX100 SSD.
The BX100 SSD managed to be in the 9.2
seconds club, a very impressive result.
Yet
another 9.2 seconds result for the BX100 SSD, and as I said a very impressive
result.
Summary:
The overall performance of the Crucial BX100
is right where I expected it to be, and that is a few steps behind the fastest SSDs
that Crucial offers.
Let's head to the next page for our
IOMeter test results.....
I/O Performance
There is little point of having an SSD
drive that has blazing sustained reading and writing speeds, if the drive can't
handle reading and writing of small random files. If you intend to use your new
SSD drive to store and run your operating system, then the drive must be able
to cope with the many small random files that Windows will write to the drive
continually. So I feel it is very important to test how many of these random
files that a drive can handle in one second. I believe that anything over 1,000
I/O’s per second would be enough for most users running a consumer grade
mainstream PC, and should provide a smooth running system. But obviously, the
more I/O's that a drive can handle, the faster the drive will feel and leave
more headroom for those huge multitasking sessions that users sometimes engage
in.
The things that I will look at are the
total I/O per second and total MB/s.
Partition alignment and sector boundaries
Windows 7 and Vista will automatically
align a partition to 4k boundaries during partition creation, Windows XP won’t.
It is imperative that an SSDs partition is aligned. Windows XP is also
restricted to sector boundaries, while Windows 7 will use 4k boundaries if it
can. The Crucial BX100 is 4k boundary aware, and will use these boundaries if
possible. Of course it will also remap LBAs for compatibility with the sector
boundaries so that the drive can be used with Windows XP.
IOMeter allows us to set the sector
boundaries for conducting the tests, and I have therefore set the sector
boundaries at 4K, which means the IOMeter tests are valid for Windows 7 and
Windows Vista users. XP users will not be able to obtain such results.
I will provide a screenshot of the tests on
the review drive for those of you who like to see the actual test result. All
the comparison drive results are represented in the form of graphs.
If any of you would like to see a
screenshot from any IOMeter test on a particular drive, please feel free to
request one, and I’ll post the screenshot in the forum thread.
All the IOMeter tests create a 10GB data
set on the target drive, and each test is run for a duration of 3 minutes.
IOMeter 4K random write test with repeating data.
The first test involves creating continual
4KB random files on the target drive with IOMeter. I use a 4KB file size, as it
is believed that Windows will create and modify many of this size of file
constantly in the background during a typical Windows session. It is said that
most 4K random writes take place at a queue depth of only one.
Queue depth 1
Crucial BX100 1B SSD (Queue depth 1)
Queue depth 4
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD (Queue depth 4)
Queue depth 32
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD (Queue depth 32)
4K random write queue depth profile
For this
test I used various queue depths from 1 – 32 to give you an idea how this SSD
performs at different queue depths. For a normal desktop user, with lightweight
multitasking, the queue depth will rarely rise above 2. For heavy multitasking,
the queue depth is unlikely to rise above a value of 8.
Things are looking hard for the Crucial BX100
1TB SSD, the drive was able to achieve the 70K IOPS that the manufacturer says
that it can but there are still faster drives out there.
IOMeter 4K random read test.
If there are many 4k files created, then
that must also mean that many 4k files need to be read. This test measures 4k
reading performance.
Queue depth 1
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD (Queue depth 1)
Queue depth 4
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD (Queue depth 4)
Queue depth 32
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD (Queue depth 32)
4K random read queue depth profile.
This test
shows how the review drive scales with increasing queue depths.
This is my major complaint about the drive,
Crucial says that the drive will do 90K IOPS but I never was able to achieve
anything better than 70K, however for a daily drive it still has a good
performance, but it leaves you asking for another 20K of IOPS.
IOMeter 512KB write test with repeating data.
Sequential writing performance is also very
important; in this test sequential writing performance is measured.
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD 512K Sequential write with repeating data
No problems for the BX100 SSD reaching its
maximum write speed with sequential data.
IOMeter 512KB read test.
This test measures 512k sequential reading
performance.
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD – 512K sequential reading test
Another excellent result for the Crucial
BX100 SSD, the drive reached 558.52MB/Sec.
IOMeter Workstation simulation (outstanding I/Os = 64).
When running applications you will find
that there is a mixture of small random files and larger sequential files,
being created and read. Not only that, it isn’t just one file at a time. In
this test I measure a simulated workstation pattern, with a queue depth of 64
(threaded).
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD – Workstation simulation
331.45MB/Sec puts the Crucial BX100 in the
middle of the graph.
Summary
The performance of the Crucial BX100 with
sequential data was simply outstanding, and the same applies for the 4K write
performance. But although its 4K read performance was good it wasn't close to what
I expected simply from reading the Crucial PDF.
Now let’s head to the next page where we
will look at how the Crucial BX100 SSD performs
using Anvil's Storage utilities....
Anvil’s Storage Utilities
As well as performing SSD endurance tests.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities has a very nice SSD benchmarking application. The SSD
benchmark tests many different aspects of SSD performance, including 4K random
at different queue depths, and also sequential performance, but more importantly
than this, all using real test data.
Another very nice feature of Anvil’s SSD
benchmark is the fact that you can change the compression levels of the test
data. The compression levels of the data sets used for the tests can be varied
from 0% compression right up to 100% compressed data, and there are even a few
data profiles already included, such as database (8%) compression, and also an
application profile (46%) compression, which is designed to simulate real
application data being read and written to the SSD.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities is still in beta
at the moment, but the application is currently solid enough to use in this
article, and I have already verified the results obtained using an SATA
analyser.
I will include a screenshot of the review
drive, and all comparison results will be presented in the form of graphs. If
you would like to see screenshots of the test results obtained on the other
SSDs in this article, you can do so by following the link here.
I will also be testing three different
compression profiles, which are as follows.
- 0 fill (100% compressible data)
- Application simulation profile (46%
compressed) - 100% (non compressible data)
So let’s begin the tests.
0 fill
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD (0 fill)
Results
are ranked by highest total score.
It looks like the Crucial BX100 SSD doesn’t
like to handle compressible data, and unfortunately stays in the third place
from the bottom of the graph..
Application profile
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD (application profile)
Results are ranked by highest total score.
An improvement for the Crucial BX100, this
time it's able to put itself in the middle of the graph.
100% incompressible
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD (100% incompressible)
Results are based on the highest total score.
Again the Crucial BX100 reaches the middle
of the graph.
Summary
Crucial’s BX100 SSD showed that it didn’t
like to handle compressible data, but other than that the drive gave a good
performance, managing to stay in the middle of our charts.
Now let's head to the next page for some
real world tests....
It has become clear that simply conducting
endless benchmarks on SSD drives is pointless. Real users may run a few
benchmarks when they first fit their SSD drive, but most users just want a
drive that performs well in the real world. They want their drive to work
"out of the box" and work fast and smoothly.
Most of the latest SSD drives can deliver
very fast sustained reading and writing speeds, but these alone tell you very
little about how the drive will perform in the real world.
If you intend to use your SSD as your
primary system drive, with an operating system and applications installed and
running from the drive, real world performance becomes much more important than
just fast sequential read and write speeds, in this case I felt that it was
time to move into a different method of testing.
From now on I will only use the log files
from the Event Viewer to measure the start-up and shutdown of the system, and
also use filecopy to measure all my copy tests from a RAM disk to the selected
storage drive that I will be testing. For these tests I will also enable all
power savings features that are available, since I believe that this is the way
that the majority of the users will have them set on their PC.
Real
world copy tests
I will now conduct some real world copy
tests so that you can have a much better view of how the drive will perform. In
these simple tests I try to simulate what a real user does with their drives. I
will be copying some mp3 files, various picture and MKV files, and finishing by
installing MS Office 2007.
As I said earlier from now on all my test
files will be stored in a RAM disk and copied/pasted to the destination drive
using filecopy. The filecopy utility will be used from now on for all my tests,
and I’ll be using it this way to measure the time that it takes to copy the
files.
Before I move on to the test, I want to
give you an idea on how fast your RAM is. Below you can find the results.
As
we can clearly see speed isn’t going to be an issue in these tests.
Copy tests – 259 MP3 song files (1.36GB total)
I will start this set of tests by copying
259 MP3 files from the RAM disk to the destination SSD and also from the SSD to
the RAM disk.
In real world usage we can see that the
BX100 SSD is capable of delivering some very impressive times in this test.
Copy tests – 3,377 JPEG picture files (2.56GB total)
Continuing my set of tests, but this time I
will be copying 2.54GB of pictures that are stored in the RAM disk to the
currently testing SSD and vice versa.
Again the BX100 SSD gave a very impressive
overall performance as you can tell by the numbers.
Copy Tests – 1 MKV and 1 SRT file (3.46GB)
Copying a movie is very common task for all
of us, and in this test there are two files that will be copied from the RAM
disk to the SSD and again from the SSD to the RAM disk.
The Crucial BX100 SSD has an outstanding
read performance and at the same time its write performance is also very good.
Copy Tests – Small files (533MB)
I have decided to adapt the very small
files test that I am using in my USB3 flash test, so this time I will be also
copying all the files from the RAM disk to the SSD and again from the SSD to
the RAM disk.
I introduced this test for flash drives
sometime ago, however I thought that it would be nice to have an idea on how an
SSD handles small files, so let’s compare the Crucial BX100 with other SSDs that
I have tested and see what result I obtained from this test. As you can tell by
the numbers the BX100 SSD continues to shine when it comes to read speed,
topping out 15.19 seconds. Write speed was acceptable for this drive.
Copy Tests – ISO (7927MB)
For this test, I copied ISO of the 'Iron
Man' movie from the RAMDisk to the SSD and vice versa.
Not much has changed, very impressive read
speed, and again acceptable write performance for the Crucial BX100 SSD.
Windows start-up and closedown based on the Event Viewer
Logs
Start-up & Shutdown time
The next two screen shots were taken after I'd
installed all the drivers and software that I use every day. Below are the
results.
The startup
time for the Crucial BX100 1TB SSD.
Shutdown
time for the Crucial BX100 1TB SSD.
You can see some previous results here
that are based on my old PC which at that time was using a Z77 ASRock extreme4
and an Intel 2500K.
Installing applications
Installing applications is possibly
something you don't do that often. But should you replace your system disk,
then you will most likely have to re-install your applications. Most of the SSD
drives I have tested up until now are quite slow at installing applications,
most likely because their I/O performance was quite limited.
For these tests, we picked some popular
applications and copied the entire contents of the CD or DVD media to the RAM disk.
We did this to make sure that the reading speed of our CD/DVD reader would not
hamper the performance of the target drive.
We then installed these applications onto
our comparison HDD drives, which were all running mirror image installations of
our Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit installation, and timed the amount of time
taken to install the application with a stopwatch on each of the drives.
MS Office 2007 Enterprise (full install)
Now let’s see
how the Crucial BX100 SSD performs
with the installation of MS Office 2007 Enterprise Edition.
The procedure
followed was very simple. I copied all the files from the CD to the RAM disk and
used the virtual drive as a source for the installation files.
I am leaving the previous graphs as
reference points, but the Crucial BX100 did install Office 2007 in 147 seconds,
that’s only 3 seconds slower than the Crucial MX200. Below are the results
compared to the Crucial MX200 SSD.
Speed degradation after heavy testing
On this page I will measure how the SSD
performs after heavy testing and usage.
I will run an AS SSD benchmark test when
the OS is freshly installed so that we can get a good view of how the drive performs
with the OS. After that I will fill the drive up to 50% of its capacity, use
the drive for a few days, and then re-run the AS SSD benchmark. The same
procedure will be followed once again, but this time the drive will be filled
close to 90% or higher of its capacity. To finish this test, I will simply
delete all the extra data and leave the PC idle for a few hours so that the
controller has the time to perform any necessary cleaning, then see how the
drive performs.
In this picture you can see the test files
that I will be copying to fill the drive with data, as you can see files vary
from 8GB ISOs to very small text files.
In the picture below you will find all the
applications that were installed for this test using Ninite, and I have also installed Microsoft
Office 2007.
Now let’s start our tests.
Here is the first run of AS SSD with the
Crucial BX100 1TB SSD, and here the overall score was almost identical to the
one that I got when the drive didn’t have the OS on it. A very nice result.
When leaving the drive with less than 4GB
of free space we can see that the BX100 gives an even better result. I didn’t
expect this, but I would recommend that you leave more free space on your SSD.
After deleting almost half the files from
the SSD the Crucial BX100 1TB SSD was capable of maintaining the performance
that we saw when it was completely filled with data.
Finally, after removing all the unnecessary
files, plus leaving the drive for five minutes to idle, the result was again
very good, 937 points for the Crucial BX100 SSD.
This concludes our review. To read the final
thoughts and conclusion, click the link below....
Conclusion:
Let us summarise the most important positive
and negative points below:
To sum up, this is what I would say:
-
I have one major complaint about the drive,
and that is the fact that it wasn’t able to reach 90K in my 4K test. Others might
also complain about the clip on chassis, but it holds the drive nicely, so no
major complaints on that from me.
+
The Crucial Storage Executive is a nice
touch for the Crucial BX100, I still like the 7mm to 9.5mm adapter.
The biggest positive for the Crucial BX100
SSD is its sequential read speed, and sequential write speeds are also very
good. With an attractive price tag this drive should be an excellent
replacement for your HDD.
Real world performance was also very good,
and from the tests that I did the drive not only gave a solid performance when
it came to speed, but its overall daily experience was very good and never at any
point did I miss the extra write performance.
The parting sentence is:
“The Crucial BX100 SSD has very good
performance for an affordable drive, and the battle will be won if Crucial can
price the BX100 aggressively.”
I am going to give the Crucial BX100 the
“Very good” rating and the “Editor’s Choice” award.
Thanks to:
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EFD |
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Alex Schepeljanski for |
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FutureMark for
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