Crucial MX300 750GB SSD Review

Shopping for a SSD can be a little confusing.  For instance do you focus on storage capacity and price or do you look at performance and pick the best one.  For the most part performance will be similar across all of the drives you can buy with only subtle differences between the control and chip selection leaving the only real thing to decide on is price.

In this review I looked at the Crucial MX300 Limited Edition 750GB SSD.  When it comes to consumer level SSDs very few of them are larger than 500GB and once you move beyond that limit they start to become expensive.  The reason for this is NAND architecture.  Traditional or Planar NAND is limited by chip size and to reach 2TB you need to use expensive chips and a whole lot of them.  Crucial has taken a different approach by using 2D NAND technology.  This new manufacturing process allows Micron to create chip that are 32 levels tall with capacities up to 384GB on a triple level TLC.

That roughly translates into 3.5TB of storage the size of a stick of gum and 2.5” SSDs in excess of 10TB.  While this limit will be attained at some point the largest drives in the MX300 series at 2TB and sell at half the cost of the closest competitor.

Affordability is the real advantage of the MX300 series and the fact that the drives are as fast if not faster than the nearest competitor you have the makings of a win win.

The benchmarks in this review showed trade-off between the 750GB MX300 and the reference drive.  Sandra reads were slower, Crystal Disk Mark random performance was faster and ATTO Disk was noticeably slower.  These three benchmarks test three different aspects of the SSD and depending on your usage can change the performance level.

Real world benchmark numbers tell a different story in favor of the Crucial MX300.  I attribute this to the larger capacity drive however the gains do coincide with the Crystal Disk Mark random scores indicating there is a correlation.

Great Performance
SATA 6 Compliant
3D NAND
Available in Sizes up to 2TB
More Storage Less Cost
Included Imaging Software

No M.2 version, yet