Page 10 - Conclusion
Let us not pretend otherwise; the results are in. For a $190 drive at press time, I think it is reasonable for us to be a little skeptical when Crucial claims the BX100 500GB is "over 15x faster", "over 2x more reliable", and "nearly 2x more energy efficient" compared to a typical hard drive. However, if you look carefully at the company's product page, you will realize nowhere did they claim the solid state drive to be the fastest storage device in the world. In fact, they acknowledge there are higher performing drives in the market, even within the Crucial brand. After many pages of benchmarks here at APH Networks today, the answer is clear. Crucial was absolutely right. The BX100 500GB is not the fastest drive in the world. It was never meant to be. However, it is a value oriented drive that delivers surprisingly good performance where, in certain tests, came dangerously close to some traditional high performance SSDs. Equipped with 16nm MLC flash ICs rated at 72TB write endurance, if you suffer from TLC-phobia, you will be happy for the next five years, even if you manage to write 40GB per day. Sure, you will not get stuff like hardware encryption, thermal throttling, and so forth. But the Crucial BX100 500GB represents a new generation of ultra-value SSDs that do not suck. If anything, Crucial's claims are well substantiated. As I have mentioned in the beginning of this review, if their claims can be substantiated, then this truth becomes of great relevance to us today. The Crucial BX100 500GB is of great relevance to us. If you are looking for a lot of quality flash storage space for not a whole lot of money, at $0.38 USD per gigabyte, my friend, time to give your credit card a small workout. Unless, of course, you are planning to buy several, because why not?
Crucial provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
APH equal.balance Award
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
For $190 at press time, the Crucial BX100 500GB represents a new generation of super budget solid state drives that -- get this -- is pretty good performing, too.
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Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 3.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 4.60
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 8.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark Vantage
10. Conclusion
