Crucial MX200 review: An excellent balance of features, performance and cost

The Crucial MX200 is a midtier solid-state drive, rivaling the recently reviewed Samsung SSD 850 Evo as an excellent storage upgrade.

8.2

Crucial MX200

The Good

The Crucial MX200 includes helpful enterprise-class features rarely available in consumer-grade SSDs. It should last a long time, and it delivers fast performance.

The Bad

The three-year warranty is short, and the drive is a bit more expensive than its competitors.

The Bottom Line

For heavy storage users who also need a high level of data safety, the Crucial MX200 is an excellent buy.

The new SSD has significantly higher durability, especially the 1TB capacity, and includes enterprise-grade data security features. In testing, it was also faster than the Samsung in certain categories.

But at the suggested price of $140 (£107.51), $250 (£192) and $470 (£361) for 250GB, 500GB and 1TB, respectively, the Crucial MX200 is more more expensive than the 850 Evo while carrying a shorter warranty of just 3 years. (Crucial says pricing for Australia is the same as for the US.)

Still, I feel comfortable recommending the drive to anyone. The MX200 has enough power to make any hard drive-based computer perform much faster. And the ultra-high endurance means you can regularly use it for heavy tasks, such as HD video editing, without having to worry about quickly rendering it useless.

If you're still looking for more options, however, check out out other models on this list of top SSDs.

A consumer drive with enterprise features

The MX200 is a 2.5-inch standard internal drive, with a design similar to most other SSDs and laptop hard drives. It supports SATA 3 (6Gbps) and works with earlier revisions of the SATA standard.

On the inside, however, it's the first such drive I've seen with a number of high-end features, normally found only in enterprise-class SSDs, that keep its stored data safe. These features include Exclusive Data Defense hardware encryption, and RAIN.

RAIN is a technology that allows a portion of the SSD's flash memory to be dedicated as parity. This means when data is saved on the drive, it's dispersed to multiple different storage components. As the result, if one storage component fails, you can still retrieve data from other components. And to reduce the chance of data corruption, each storage component has four layers of Exclusive Data Defense.

The MX200 supports AES 256-bit hardware encryption that is TCG Opal 2.0- and IEEE1667-compliant. This makes it fit in business environment where data security in case of theft or loss is important. On top of that the drive also features power-loss protection, adaptive thermal monitoring, TRIM, SMART and DevSleep, which enables it to use very little power.

Ultra-high endurance, helpful software

The Samsung SSD 850 Evo has impressive endurance, but the MX200 tops that by a large margin. Endurance, also known as program/erase (P/E) cycles, is the rating that quantifies the total amount of data that can be written to an SSD before the drive becomes unreliable. You can think of endurance as the drive's durability. (For more on the endurance of SSDs, check out this post.)

Generally endurance increases with capacity: the MX200 is available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities that have respective endurance ratings of 80TB, 160TB and 320TB. Particularly with the 1TB drive, you'd have to write 40GB of data to it per day, every day, continuously for 22 years before it became unreliable.

Note that an SSD's endurance relates only to writing, as reading doesn't affect its life span at all. Also, 40GB is quite a lot of data. On average, most days we don't write even a fraction of that to our computer's main drive, and many days we don't write anything at all.

Nonetheless, the high endurance allows pro users to use the drive for heavy tasks that involve lots of data writing, such as video editing or data swapping. If you get the 1TB capacity, it's safe to say that you can use it without having to worry about abusing its P/E cycles.

The MX200 includes Crucial's Storage Executive software for managing the drive. Apart from monitoring the drive's status, you can also use the software to update the firmware and change or remove the password for the drive's encryption feature. The drive also includes a license for Acronis True Image HD 2014, which is one of the best software applications for drive backups and cloning; it normally costs another $30.

A tad pricey

At launch the MX200's suggested price was higher than that of the Samsung SSD 850 Evo. By the time this review was done, however, its price had already dropped lower than its suggested retail price, with the 250GB and 1TB versions costing some $10 and $25 less, respectively. However, even with the price cuts, currently the MX200 is still a few cents per gigabyte more expensive than some of its competitors.

But this difference in pricing is very minor, considering the value of the included software. And like all newly released SSDs, in a month or so, the MX200 will surely drop even further in price.

Performance

As with the Samsung SSD 850 Evo, I tested the Crucial MX200 with a midrange computer running a Core i5 processor with 8GB of system memory, and it really made a big difference in the machine's performance.

In the sequential data transferring test, which is a test that gauges a drive's raw copy speed, the new drive scored a sustained speed of 190MBps when doing both writing and reading at the same time, almost 10MBps faster than the 850 Evo. When used as a secondary drive and performing writing and reading separately, the drive scored 433MBps for writing and 412MBps for reading, ranking in the top three on the charts and more than double the speed of the 850 Evo. Note, however, sequential performance is not the most important thing about SSDs when you use them as the main storage unit of a computer; rather it's the random-access performance.

And the MX200's random-access performance was decent. In tests with the PC Mark benchmark suite, the MX200 was on par with other SSDs, though at times it was slightly below the 850 Evo.

PC Mark 8 also showed that the two drives were very similar in terms of application performance. The test computer also booted much faster with the MX200 (just around 10 seconds) when compared with a regular hard drive (close to a minutes); all applications also loaded significantly faster.

Generally, you sure will see a huge performance gain moving from a regular hard drive to the MX200. However, if you were using another SSD before, the difference you'll see with the MX200 will be hard to notice.

Conclusion

Apart from the relatively short three-year warranty, there's not much I don't like about the MX200. Crucial has done a great job with the drive by packing it with many useful features and pumping its sequential performance and endurance a great deal, so that it rivals even top-tier SSDs such as the Samung SSD 850 Pro and the SanDisk Extreme Pro.

If you have a computer that still uses a hard drive as the main storage device holding the operating system, upgrading to the MX200 will turn that machine in to a powerhouse that you never thought possible since the hard drive is the main bottleneck of a computer's overall performance. On top of that, the support for hardware encryption also makes the MX200 an excellent choice for businesses looking to safeguard their data without having to pay for enterprise-class SSDs.

The MX200 isn't the best SSD on the market, but it has an excellent balance of performance, features and pricing. And it'll get better in a month or two when its street price catches up with those of its competitors.