Following last summer's release of the Crucial MX100 SSD series, the company has just released MX200 series, which improves on its predecessor mainly due to its new Dynamic Write Acceleration technology and other features such as the drive's use of an adaptable pool of flash memory. Crucial is marketing the MX200 as a very reliable SSD solution for mainstream consumers.

The specifications of the new SSDs state that the drives will deliver higher than 550MB/s in sequential reads on both compressible and incompressible data, which is equivalent to the reported speed of the MX100. The Crucial MX200 also features the RAIN technology, which protects user data at the component level. This means that the data that is being saved on the MX200 is dispersed on multiple storage components on the drive. As a result, if one of these components fails, user data would still be protected and reserved elsewhere on the drive. The new Crucial drive also features AES 256-bit encryption , Adaptive Thermal Protection technology to dynamically adjust storage component activity based on how the drive is being used, and Power Loss Protection to preserve user data if power is lost. The MX200 meets or exceeds all industry encryption standards, including Microsoft eDrive, IEEE-1667, and TCG Opal 2.0.

The MX200 is using Micron's 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND and the a Marvell 88SS9189 controller - the same controller used in the MX100.

The Crucial MX200 is available in capacities of 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB in various form factors - (2.5” 7mm, mSATA, M.2 Type 2260, and M.2 Type 2280). All drives ship with a 3-year warranty.

Today we will benchmark the 500GB version of the MX200, which does not support the Dynamic Write Acceleration feature. Its TBW is 160TB, equal to 87GB per day for five years. The drive's life expectancy (MTTF) is 1.5 million hours.

Here are the specs:

As you are seeing above, despite the use of 128Gbit NAND, there is no performance hit at smaller capacities, something we saw with the MX100 series.