Crucial MX300 Limited Edition (750GB) review – CNET

The Good The Crucial 750GB MX300 SSD Limited Edition is competitively priced and delivers fast performance. The solid-state drive uses efficient 3D flash memory and provides strong security with hardware encryption.

The Bad The drive is available in a single capacity of 750GB that might not be a good fit for those needing something smaller. The drive has a short 3-year warranty and in performance it can’t touch its main competitor, the Samsung 850 Evo.

The Bottom Line If you’re looking for a high-capacity SSD upgrade for your computer, the new Crucial MX300 is speedy and affordable.

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The Crucial MX300 is available in a single capacity of 750GB.

Dong Ngo/CNET

If my review of the first solid-state drive with 3D flash memory, the well-balanced Samsung SSD 850 Evo, piqued your interest, then you’ll be happy to know there’s a new player in town: the all-new MX300 750GB drive from Crucial.

The MX300 is the second SSD to use 3D flash memory (as opposed to the traditional, planar 2D flash memory.) If you think of each memory cell as a person, then 3D flash memory to 2D flash memory is like high rises to single-family homes. You can house a lot more people with the former, on the same patch of land.

CNET Labs SSD copy tests

Samsung SSD 850 Evo

182.78

214.45

205.63

Samsung SSD 750 Evo

180

246.45

203.67

Crucial MX300

178.34

245.67

199.32

Toshiba Q300

165.67

355.6

202.7

OCZ ACR 100

163.53

289.39

385.71

OCZ Trion 100

124.19

185.35

352.32

Legend:

As OS drive (read and write)
As secondary drive (write only)
As secondary drive (read only)

Note:

Measured in megabytes per second. Longer bars mean better performance.

The Crucial drive is quite different from Samsung’s, however. For one the MX300 is available in just a single capacity of 750GB, whereas the 850 Evo can be bought at 120GB all the way up to 2TB. (Crucial says it will release more capacities and physical designs later this year.) Ironically, the Crucial drive is missing a few crucial features, most notably the ability to customize overprovisioning (a predetermined amount of storage space put aside to better the drive efficiency) and boost speed by using a host computer’s system memory as cache, both perks available on the Samsung. For this reason, in testing, the MX300, though faster than many budget SSDs and significantly faster than any hard drives, was clearly slower than the SSD 850 Evo.

PC Mark Storage test

Samsung SSD 750 Evo

4986

284.78

Samsung SSD 850 Evo

4983

276.16

OCZ ACR 100 series

4948

203.72

Crucial MX300

4914

198.33

Toshiba Q300

4894

186.68

OCZ Trion 100

4875

175.38

Legend:

Storage Score
Storage bandwith (MBps)

Note:

Longer bars mean better performance.

To make up for that fact, the 750GB MX300 is cheaper, with a suggested price of just $200 (£140, AU$270, converted,) or about 27 cents per gigabyte. The Samsung SSD 850, which came out 2.5 years ago, is not available in a 750GB capacity but on average costs about 31 cents per gigabyte, or $233 for $750GB. It’s likely that the MX300’s price will get even lower in next couple of months.

The MX300 supports the highest AES 256-bit hardware encryption, making it great for business users looking to keep their data private. It also has very high endurance rating: Crucial says you can write up to 220TB of data to the drive (or 120GB per day and every day for five years) before it would become unreliable. That’s a lot of writing, since most of us don’t write more than 10GB on a busy day. However, it comes with just a three-year warranty, which is shorter than the five years the Samsung SSD 850 Evo gets.

Should I get it?

Available at one large capacity of 750GB, the Crucial MX300 is a great deal for those in need of a large SSD and have $200 to burn on it. But on the other hand, if you want a smaller capacity, you can save some money by going with the Crucial BX200 or the Samsung SSD 850 Evo. In all, the MX300 is easy for me to recommend to anybody who wants to upgrade a computer still running on a regular hard drive.