Review: Crucial MX200 Reviewed by: ANTONIS SAPANIDIS Provided by: Crucial Model: MX200 500GB SSD Firmware version:> MU01

The descendant of the Crucial
MX100 has arrived, and as you might expect the name is MX200, and it should
be mainly based on the Micron
M600. So let’s focus more on the Crucial MX200, first of all the drive is
available in capacities of 240GB, 500GB, and 1TB, you will also find the drive
in 2.5” SATA, mSATA, and M.2 form factors. Some capacities will also feature
the DWA (Dynamic Write Acceleration) technology that was introduced in the Micron
M600 SSD.

Below you can see some general information
about the Crucial MX200 SSD, and you can also find out more simply by visiting
the crucial website, here,
or by reading the PDF
for the MX200 SSD.

One more thing that needs our attention is
the arrival of the Crucial Storage Executive software, something that was
missing from the Crucial arsenal, you can download the software from here.

Let’s take a quick look at the software and
what it offers.

The software will open a new window in your
browser, and you will see six main buttons on the left side, all of which offer
different functions, and serve different purposes. In the picture below you can
see that there is information about the Crucial MX200, such as disk usage,
temperature, and how many bytes have been written. You can check the S.M.A.R.T.
values and also check if there is a firmware update for your SSD, note that the
firmware update is a fully automated procedure. One last thing and very
important thing is the option to sanitise the drive, again this is a fully
automated procedure and will bring the drive back to its original state, you
will be warned that all your data will be erased, but make a backup if you have
something important.

Now let’s take a look at the package, its
contents and the Drive.

Crucial MX200 500GB SSD

Let’s start by taking a look at the package
and the contents of the Crucial MX200 SSD. We'll start with the package.

The design is almost identical to what we
have already seen from Crucial, the only changes are the darker blue colour,
the product name, and the capacity.

Looking at the back of the box we find out
that the drive comes with a three year warranty, a 7mm to 9.5mm spacer, the SSD
itself, and also a key for Acronis True Image, something that will make life
much easier now and also in the future.

The bottom side of the Crucial MX200 SSD
has only a sticker with all the information that is needed about the drive.

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 MX200 SSD we find eight NAND chips.

On
the back of the Crucial MX200 SSD we find the Marvel controller, the RAM chip,
and eight 16nm NAND chips.

A
closer look at the NAND,

and the
Marvel 88SS9189 controller.

Specifications of the MX200 500GB

In the pictures below we can see a more
detailed view of the performance of the MX200 SSD series, and form factors.

 

CrystalDiskInfo

In
the above screenshot we see all the available info for the Crucial MX200 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
• 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 MX200 500GB 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 see the formatted size of the Crucial MX200 SSD is 466GB.

The SATA 6Gbps drivers used on our review
PC were Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) Version 13.1.0.1058.

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Test applications

To test the performance of the Crucial MX200
500GB 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
MX200 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  MX200 SSD, and will complement this with
advanced benchmarks using IOMeter and AS SSD benchmark. I will also show how
the Crucial MX200 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.

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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 MX200 500GB SSD

 Comparison SSD

 

Now let's head to the next page, where I
look at some basic benchmarks...

Reading Benchmarks

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HD Tune

HD Tune – Sequential reading test

I present the graph below for comparison
with other recently tested drives.

The Crucial MX200 falls behind in this test
even to the older M550, however the result is still acceptable.

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ATTO disk benchmark

ATTO has become a standard tool for
measuring the data throughput of HDD and SSD. It measures the reading and
writing performance, using different file sizes and block sizes.

When it comes to ATTO we are used to its
ability to extract the maximum out of any drive, and the Crucial MX200 SSD is
no exception, both read and write speeds are outstanding for an SATA 6 SSD.

---

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 MX200 was able to give some very
impressive results in this test.

The two graphs below will give a more
detailed view of how the Crucial MX200 compares with other SSDs that I have
re-tested.

Here
I present the graph for the read speed tests. You can compare the Crucial MX200
SSD with other drives.

I
continue by presenting the graph for the write speed tests. You can compare the
Crucial MX200 SSD with other drives.

Now the Crucial MX200 shows what it can
really achieve, and it’s up there with the M600, but that drive will be almost
impossible to buy, and the Crucial MX200 has better write results compared to
the MX100 and the M500.

---

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
MX200 500GB SSD in the form of a screenshot. All our other comparison drives’
results are presented in the form of a graph.

In this test it’s clear that the total
score of the drive isn’t as impressive as the M550 but still, for a SAT 6 SSD,
the result is very good.

 

Let's head to the next page and run some
tests using PCMark 8.....

 

PCMark Vantage - HDD Suite

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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 MX200 500GB SSD.

A more detailed view of the performance of
the Crucial MX200 500GB SSD, as we can see the drive is amongst the fastest
ones that I have tested.

The score for the Crucial MX200 SSD is
81075, that’s impressive especially if compared to the MX100. Overall an
excellent result.

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 MX200 500GB SSD.

294.18MB/Sec is the magic number that the
Crucial MX200 showed in PCMark 8, another excellent result.

As I
expected the MX200 SSD didn’t have any issues displaying its high performance.

Again
the Crucial MX200 SSD continues to deliver an amazing performance.

The
result says it all about the performance of the Crucial MX200 SSD.

Top
performance for the Crucial MX200 SSD.

Once
again the Crucial MX200 showed an excellent result.

132.9
seconds is an excellent result for the Crucial MX200 SSD.

This
is one of the few tests that the Crucial MX200 lags behind the top performing
SSD, but only by 0.3 seconds.

I can't
really complain about the result, the Crucial MX200 is only 0.1 second slower than
the fastest drives.

It
looks like 9.2 seconds is the standard in this test, and the Crucial MX200 SSD
can easily achieve this number.

Another
top result for the Crucial MX200.

Summary:

The overall performance of the Crucial
MX200 is very close to outstanding. In almost every test it was able to give a very
strong result, and in the few tests that was behind, it was only for 0.1 to 0.3
seconds, overall an excellent performance.

 

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 MX200 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 MX200 500GB SSD (Queue depth 1)

Queue depth 4

Crucial MX200 500GB SSD (Queue depth 4)

Queue depth 32

Crucial MX200 500GB 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.

Crucial’s MX200 was able to give some very
good results, but still I would love to have seen some better numbers.

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 MX200 500GB SSD (Queue depth 1)

Queue depth 4

Crucial MX200 500GB SSD (Queue depth 4)

Queue depth 32

Crucial MX200 500GB SSD (Queue depth 32)

4K random read queue depth profile.    

This test
shows how the review drive scales with increasing queue depths.

The read test tells a different side to the
story, and here the results are very impressive, as you can see by the graph
above.

IOMeter 512KB write test with repeating data.

Sequential writing performance is also very
important; in this test sequential writing performance is measured.

Crucial MX200 500GB SSD 512K Sequential write with repeating data

The result is excellent, with the MX200
able to achieve a very impressive score of 510.24 MB/Sec in the write test.

IOMeter 512KB read test.

This test measures 512k sequential reading
performance.

Crucial MX200 500GB SSD – 512K sequential reading test

Again the Crucial MX200 SSD displays
outstanding performance, when it comes to sequential read, the drive was able
to reach 555.32 MB/Sec and that is very impressive.

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 MX200 500GB SSD – Workstation simulation

Once again the Crucial MX200 was able to stay
on top of all the other drives that I have tested and achieve 384.36 MB/Sec,
the only drive that gave a better result was the Micron M600 and by only 0.26
MB/Sec.

Summary

The Crucial MX200 is an outstanding drive
when it comes to sequential data, it’s also very capable of handling random
data but I would have like to see some better numbers, overall the MX200 gives an
impressive performance.

 

Now let’s head to the next page where we
will look at how the Crucial MX200 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 MX200 500GB SSD (0 fill)

Results
are ranked by highest total score.

The results are very close to the Crucial
MX100, and the Crucial MX200 gets the third place in this test.

Application profile

Crucial MX200 500GB SSD (application profile)

Results are ranked by highest total score.

Once again the Crucial MX200 stays at third
place in the chart. A slightly better write result would have put the MX200
higher.

100% incompressible

Crucial MX200 500GB SSD (100% incompressible)

Results are based on the highest total score.

With incompressible data the Crucial MX200
reaches the top on this chart with very good results for both read and write.

Summary

You win some you lose some, but in the end
the newer drive had no issues displaying its speed, overall again an impressive
performance for the Crucial MX200 SSD.

 

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

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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.

As we can see from the chart above the
Crucial MX200 was able to give an impressive result, displaying how good its
performance is.

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 picture that are stored in the RAM disk to the currently
testing SSD and vice versa.

Writing 2.36Gb of small files needed 12.28
seconds, and only 5.84 seconds for the Crucial MX200 SSD to complete this test,
again a very impressive result.

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.

Here the drives that have a good sequential
read and write speeds should have no problems topping the chart, so let's see
how the Crucial MX200 SSD did in this test. The MX200 needed 7.47 seconds to
write the two files to the SSD, and only 6.86 seconds to write the files back
to the RAM disk.

Copy Tests – Small files (533MB)

I have decided to adapt the very small
files test that I am using on 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 of how an
SSD handles small files, so let's compare the Crucial MX200 with other SSDs and
see what result that I got from this test. It took only 15.44 seconds for the
MX200 to send all the files to the RAMDisk, and only 16.7 seconds to write the
48,128 files to the SSD. This is an impressive result.

Copy Tests – ISO (7927MB)

For this test, I copied ISO of the 'Iron
Man' movie from the RAMDisk to the SSD and vice versa.

Again the Crucial MX200 continues to show
outstanding read performance, but at the same time the write speeds are also
very impressive, 16.2 seconds and 24.8 seconds are very good results.

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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 Crucial
MX200 500GB SSD.

Shutdown
procedure, again measured in milliseconds.

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

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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 MX200 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 results as
reference points, but the Crucial MX200 did install Office 2007 in 144 seconds
and that is very impressive.

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 MX200 SSD, and here is the overall score that the MX200 achieved, which
is a very good 1051.

Leaving the drive with less that 4GB of
free space should have an impact on the SSD and, as we can see, performance is
dropping. Still the Crucial MX200 did manage to achieve a score of 959 points.

Deleting files and leaving the drive filled
halfway shows that the Crucial MX200 is capable of regaining a lot of its performance
back.

Finally after removing all the unnecessary
files we can see a score of 1063 for the Crucial MX200.

 

This concludes our review. To read the final
thoughts and conclusion, click the link below....

 

Conclusion:

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Let us summarise the most important
positive and negative points below:

To sum up, this is what I would say:

-

I would have like to have seen slightly
better performance for 4K read speeds, but even with these numbers the results
are still very good. Also a five year warranty would have been welcomed.

+

I would start with the most important part,
that is the arrival of the Crucial Storage Executive, a software package that
was much needed, and that can make life much easier for users to monitor their
SSD. Sequential read and write speeds are also very impressive, especially
since there isn’t much more speed to get out of SATA3.

The 7mm to 9.5mm adaptor is something that
I like to see, also the Acronis True Image HS key is also something that adds
more to the value to the Crucial MX200 SSD.

The endurance of the 500GB SSD is another
impressive thing, the drive should be able to handle 160TB, and an impressive
86GB per day, that number goes even higher for the 1TB SSD, however is lower in
the 240GB SSD but then again it's 43GB per day.  The Crucial MX200 is available
in all three major form factors, SATA, M.2, and mSATA, and in some cases, when
it’s needed, the MX200 has the help of DWA (Dynamic Write Acceleration) that
was introduced on the Micron
M600.

 

The parting sentence is:

“Crucial did a very nice job with the
MX200 SSD, they added functionality like DWA, continued to have excellent
performance, and now you have Crucial Storage Executive to help monitor your
SSD.  I am impressed with what Crucial has done so far, small steps, but always
in the right direction.”

I am going to give the Crucial MX200 the
“Excellent” award.

 

Thanks to:

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