The BX300, although it has been designed as a replacement for slow HDD, offers much more than that. The choice of (3D) V-NAND helps the drive's write performance, and armed with dual-caches and the new Silicon Motion SM2258 controller makes it a very competitive drive.

The quoted performance figures for the 480GB BX300 are 555MB/s and 510MB/s for Sequential read/writes respectively. The reviewed drive produced a read figure pretty close to those quoted by Micron, with an expeption with the Anvil Storage software.

Random read/write performance for the 480GB drive is quoted as up to 95,000 IOPS for reads with write’s up to 90,000 IOPS. Our benchmarks generaly confirmed these claims.

The BX300's peak performance is on average slightly below top-tier SATA drives like Samsung's 850 PRO and EVO and the Intel 545s. But this is offset by how well the BX300 retains its performance under heavier workloads and when operating with a nearly-full drive.

With 64-layer 3D NAND still ramping up to full production, Micron has chosen for the BX300 to use their 256Gb 3D MLC that allows for a small SSD to be reasonably fast and free of the downsides of the TLC NAND that dominates the entry-level SSD market.

Surprisingly, Micron is offering its MLC SSD for less than their TLC SSD without making serious compromises. However, Micron is offering just a 3-year warranty for the BX300.

With the MX300 doing so well as a mainstream SSD with entry-level pricing, the focus of the BX line has shifted from being the cheaper option to being the drive designed specifically for the smaller capacities demanded by cost-conscious consumers.

The BX300 is more than typical entry-level SSD. The drive delivers great performance in some cases but still trail the EVOs slightly in some applications and their five-year warranty.