Crucial has been pushing mainly its two major product line including the BX and MX series. In the beginning, the BX series have been equipped with TLC flash at budget pricing and the MX series been shipped with the MLC flash. But recently, Crucial began to project the BX SSD series as their mainstream product line and even outperformed the MX series to some extent. The BX 300 series of SSD brings with it the famed MLC NAND back into its entry-level SSDs. The BX300 series comes in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB flavors. The BX300 series uses the SM2258 Silicon Motion Controller.
Design and Features
As the BX300 comes in 3 flavors, they BX300 series SSDs can be expected to provide a usage time of 5-15 years as each version provides:
BX300 120 GB version – 55 TBW
BX300 240 GB version – 80 TBW
BX300 480 GB version – 160 TBW (Terabytes written)
The Crucial BX300 series is available only in a 2.5-inch drive format, so people with small 2-in-1s and laptops having M.2 slots need to go find another SSD to upgrade their drives. The BX300’s exterior design is made up of a striking silver metal shell covered with a beautiful sticker in attractive blue-white color. If you have been using the Crucial drives before, then the color may look familiar to you. Similar to most of the 2.5-inch drives, the BX300 series is also 7mm thick and for people using old laptops with 9.5 mm drives, a spacer is included in the box.
Even though it is not needed for many to peek inside the SSD, Crucial yet provides you an easier option to look inside the drive through 4 small screws. Just unscrew them and you are well inside the SSD and you can see a lot of empty space inside.
Packaging
The BX300 SSD comes in an attractive silver aluminum enclosure and comes with a regular SATA III interface. The package also comes with Acronis True Image HD software to help you port all your data to the new SSD from your old drive. The package also includes a spacer to help fit the SSD in older laptops and desktops with a 9.5mm spacer as the SSD can fit only with a 7.5 mm. Even though the BX300 series uses the SATA III 6 Gbps interface, it is also compatible with the SATA I and II interfaces, but do understand that the drive won’t work to its full potential, but only at a lesser speed when compared to using the III interface.
The Crucial Storage Executive storage that doesn’t come with the package, but can be downloaded to monitor your SSD’s performance and also to update the firmware etc. The software also helps in enhancing the performance of the SSD and also to secure-erase the SSD as well. To enhance the burst performance of the SSD, make sure to enable the Momentum Cache feature in the Storage executive software. The software also helps you to track the total amount of storage utilized and also to monitor the health and temperature of the SSD easily.
Performance
Similar to the predecessors from Crucial, the BX300 is also an impressive launch from the house of Crucial, as it provides another cheap option for the users to upgrade their computers from a regular hard disk drive to a drive that runs way faster with the help of the exclusive solid state technology. The all-new BX 300 120GB SSD comes packed with Micron 3D NAND, a silicon motion controller, a spacer to fit for 9mm thick adapters.
With just a 7mmm form factor along with a SATA 6GB/s interface, the BX300 can easily fit on almost all compact lines of desktops and notebooks. Even though the previous version of BX300 SSDs had some inconsistent performance based on the benchmark results, it still proves to be one of the best, cheaper SSD drives on the market.
It is always wise to upgrade your traditional hard disk to an SSD and if you are upgrading to a BX300 SSD, you are not upgrading at a very reasonable price, but also largely increasing your systems read/write speed and the access time to a great extent. You can feel the difference instantly with the speed with which your system operates and opens each and every application quickly when compared with your old hard disk.
The only problem if you want to say about the BX300 SSD is that it only comes with 3 year warranty, whereas the Samsung SSDs comes with 5 year warranty and even 10 year warranty for the 850 Pro SSD. Apart from this one disadvantage, if you want to call it that way, the BX 300 is one of the best SSD you could ever buy at this price range.
Conclusion
The Crucial BX300 series of SSDs are really a clear winner with its various ranges of 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB SSDs. During our regular tests with the SSDs the 240GB and 480GB models, the SSDs exceeded our expectations with their performance and largely matches the performance of the Samsung 850 EVO and PRO. Also, when compared with the price, the BX300 is tough to beat as they are priced much lower than the Samsung SSDs and provide much more performance per dollar.
The BX 300 SSDs also come with Acronis True Image software to enable the user to protect their precious data as they can easily backup all the data quickly, archive the data or recover all deleted data easily. The software is also pretty much easy to use and you don’t need any external help or browse through many user manuals to understand the functionality, but can start using it instantly. If you are really looking to upgrade your hard disk, then look no further than the BX300 SSDs, as it provides great features and increases the read/write speed to a large extent and also consumes only a less amount of power.
Review in Progress . . .
