Crucial MX100 was one of the best affordable SSDs on the market last year. This year, Crucial updated the line-up with not one but two drives: the BX100 and the MX200. While the MX200 is the successor to the MX100 and aimed for mainstream market, the BX100 is designed for budget market. The two drives shared the same 16nm NAND but with different controller. Besides the controller difference, the budget drive lacks the hardware-accelerated encryption and the SLC caching that is found on its bigger brother. The SLC caching has its benefit enhancing a drive’s write performance but the hardware encryption maybe something that budget users may not care much. The controller that is inside the BX100 is the Silicon Motion’s 2246EN. This is departure for Crucial as it often uses Marvell based controller over the last few years. So this is the first time that the company uses non-Marvell controller for its SSD. The Silicon Motion 2246 is a four-channel controller which is a bit less than typical 8 or 10 that we found on the higher performance SATA drive. Thus, its parallel performance would be lower than other drives though the transfer rates per channel is pretty fast at 400MB/s.



Link: Bjorn3D