Here is our testbed:

• Shuttle SH81R4
  Processor: Intel i7 4790Graphics card: Club3D Radeon HD 6790 CoolStream EditionMemory: 2x8GB RAM DDR3-1600 CrucialSSD: 512GB Crucial MX100Monitor: LG L246WH-BH 24"
• Windows 7 x64 SP1 with latest updates installed

We start the tests with the HDTachRW software. The software measures the sequential read speed, the random access speed and sequential write speed. Remember that the HDTachRW feeds the tested drive a continuous string of small sequential requests. It doesn't equate to real-world maximum throughput, but it does mean something for analysis.

The drive's reading speed was consistent throughout its capacity and the average read speed was at 396MB/s. But it seems that the drive cannot keep up with the continuous string of small sequential requests in the write part, so it slowed down through out the test to just 66.6MB/s.

The next software we used was the ATTO Disk Benchmark. The tool measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. The benchmark performs file transfers ranging from 0.5 KB to 8192 KB. ATTO can be adjusted to do overlapped I/O, in a variety of queue depths. We tested the SSD using the benchmark's default settings, using 256KB file length performance and QD4. ATTO probably gives the most accurate results for compressible read and write data.

The BX200 produced some odd plots. Although read performance scales up in a mostly normal fashion, write performance is all over the place, especially with 64KB and smaller files. The results were inconsistent..

Reads reached 556MB/s and writes reached 499MB/s. With small 4KB file sizes, the write performance does not seem to scale with the read, and again we saw the drive write 4K files at just 61MB/s. Later one and with larger files, the performance increased significantly.

We selected to show you the performance of the drive with 4K and 2MB files. The Crucial BX200 960GB SSD is fast but not among the top performers in the read test with 4K small files, as you see below:

With larger 2MB files, the drive's performance is high at 556.7MB/s, close to the performance of the Crucial BX100 1TB SSD.

In the write part, the low rank in the following graph for the BX200 SSD is due to the drive's slowdown with small 4K files, as we previously saw:

Write of larger 2MB files was faster at about 500MB/s. In this case the BX200 lest the BX100 SSD behind. The BX200 performed according to its specs.