Test – Crucial BX300 480 Go |Specs | Price

Introduction

Hi all!

Back to Crucial today with their brand new SSD model, the BX300! The BX series represents the entry level of the brand, with the minimum union for Mr Toutlemonde while maintaining sufficient performance for everyday use.
After a BX200 which was good at reading but suffered from some small problems with writing speeds for very large files (after the cache of “only” 6GB was full, see the test here) the brand decided to erase all this on the BX300.
The BX300 from Crucial are available in 3 versions, 120, 240 and 480GB (the test version) offered at 60, 90 and 150 € respectively. The price here is very close to its big brothers MX300, to see according to the evolution of the price after everything has settled down 😉

Characteristics

The Crucial BX300 is of course an SSD in 2.5 ″ format with a thickness of 7 or 9.5mm (with the adapter supplied), so no worries about installing it in all (or almost!) boxes on the market, unless you have an old box from the 90s;). Crucial trusted Silicon Motion for their controller as they did for the BX200, this time with version 2258 of the controller.
Crucial change (sorry I had to do it) in terms of memory on the other hand compared to its predecessor since we are returning here to MLC chips more enduring than the TLC that we found on the BX200 (and MX300 !). This MLC memory brings a significant gain on the overall endurance of the BX300 compared to the BX200, in fact the 480 GB version goes from 72 TB to 160 TB, which is clearly not nothing and could be interesting for users with a intensive use of their SSD. For the majority of users, on the other hand, I doubt that this will change much, but we can only welcome this change.
Another change for the better, the cache memory! Indeed when we had “only” 6GB on the BX200 480GB we go to 16GB for the BX300, which will undoubtedly be appreciated by those who copy large files, the writing speed dropping drastically once the cache is cached. full, as we have seen here on the BX200. The smallest models on the other hand do not benefit from as much cache memory, the 120GB with 4GB on board against 8GB for the 240GB.
The sequential read and write speed is also evolving, now rising to 555MB / s read and 510MB / s write, nothing that really changes the game but it’s still good to take. The number of IOPS also increases more drastically this time, going from 66,000 in random read for the BX200 480 GB to 90,000 for the BX300 480 GB, while the random write goes from 78,000 to 95,000. Will this change anything during normal use? I doubt!
Offered at a price ranging from 60 to 150 € and accompanied by a 3-year warranty, the BX300 are very close to the MX300 which are supposed to be more upscale, to see in the tests if the price is justified!

Unpacking and presentation

The box takes the design that we have known now at Crucial for years, with a photo of the beast in profile accompanied by the logo of the brand, the model and its capacity. No pompous marketing and that’s nice!

At the back is a listing of the contents of the box as well as a mention of the 3 year warranty, circulate there is nothing to see!

At the back is a plastic mold in which the SSD sits, as usual with Crucial.

Regarding the bundle Crucial offers exactly the same as usual, namely the SSD (yes still a minimum!), A plastic adapter allowing to pass its thickness from 7mm to 9.5mm as well as a number of serial for Acronis True Image HD software (which allows you to quickly clone a disk).

We take the same thing and start over, the BX300 is made of an aluminum frame which makes the thing very light and rather solid, the beast does not look “cheap”. A sticker on each side, above the series is presented and below we find the different bar codes.