Introduction, Specifications and Packaging

The fastest we’ve seen the Silicon Motion SM2246EN go!

Introduction:

Micron's Crucial brand has been cranking out some great low cost SSDs for the past several years now. While their early drives pushed into the SATA 6Gb/sec interface before most of the competition, their performance was inconsistent and lagged behind some of the other more nimble solutions available at that time. This pattern was broken around the time of the M550 and MX100 launches. Those two drives were heavily competitive in performance and even moreso in pricing. Actually the pricing is probably the bigger story – when they launched, one of our readers caught a 512GB MX100 on sale for $125 ($0.24/GB)! We are coming up on a year since the MX100, and at CES 2015 Micron launched a pair of SSD models – the BX100 and MX200. Today we are going to look at the BX100 series:

Crucial aims to make the BX100 as their lowest cost/GB SSD ever – even cheaper than the MX100. Since Micron makes the flash, the best way to drive costs down is to use a lower cost controller. The Silicon Motion SM2246EN is cheaper to procure than the equivalent Marvell part, yet still performs rather well.

The Silicon Motion SM2246EN SSD controller

This is a great controller, as we have seen in our prior review of the ADATA SP610, Corsair Neutron LX, and Angelbird SSD WRK. From the specs, we can see that Micron has somehow infused their variant with increased write speeds even though it appears to use the same flash as those competing models listed above. We'll see how this plays out as the review progresses.

Read on for the full review!

Specifications (from this page):

The point of interest here is the improved write speed ratings at the lower capacities. The MX100 was limited to 300 MB/sec at 256GB and 150 MB/sec at 128GB. The BX100 shows a 70 MB/sec improvement at 250GB and a 35 MB/sec improvement at 120GB.

Packaging:

Very simple packaging here. Adhesive backed 2.5mm spacer included for installing the 7mm drive into a 9.5mm bay.

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