Crucial BX200 960GB SSD review
2. The drive
Below you see the packaging design of the SSD, which has a picture of the drive accented by blue and white.
Crucial's BX200 includes access to Acronis True Image for cloning existing drives and the company's Storage Executive software.
The Crucial BX200 is identical to the BX100 as far as its exterior design is concerned. It has the same stylized label sticker that is placed on the front of the SSD, which displays the Crucial logo, product brand, and the form-factor information. The enclosure is comprised of a robust metal build.
Located on the backside of the drive is information about the specific model, including the model number, capacity, and form factor
The Crucial BX200 uses equipped Silicon Motion SM2256 Controller with 4-channels of Micron NAND flash. Along with the Micron NAND, Crucial is also utilizing Micron LPDDR3 DRAM. Each package is 512MB in capacity and thus the 960GB model has a 1GB cache.
The drive came with firmware Ver. MU01.4 installed. The readout on CrystalDiskInfo shows that NCQ, S.M.A.R.T, TRIM and DevSleep are all enabled. Once formatted the 960GB model has 894GB usable space.
Below you see come scsreenshots from the Storage Executive software - now standard with all Crucial SSDs.
The software tool was just released last January and is already up to version 3.24. Crucial has added a DRAM cache function called Momentum Cache, similar to Samsung's Rapid Mode and Plextor's PlexTurbo.
Micron's Momentum Cache is an intelligent software driver that dynamically leverages unused system resources to enhance burst performance on supported Micron and Crucial solid-state drives (SSDs) in Windows operating systems. Momentum Cache is not restricted by SATA bus throughput limitations; instead, it uses additional DRAM bandwidth to achieve increased burst performance.
The software also lets you configure over-provisioning for enhanced endurance and performance. With more space reserved, random write performance increases. Endurance improves as well due to better flash management. Latency may even drop under the right conditions