The test system used in this review was an HP 8200 Elite. The computer came equipped with an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 1333MHz memory, Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3250312AS 250GB SATA 6 Gb/s hard drive, NVIDIA Quadro FX580 512MB PCIe graphics card and an Intel 82579-LM gigabit network card. For the operating system, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 8.1 Enterprise.
To test the performance of Crucial's MX300 M.2 SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark 8. For comparison, I've also included test results from the Crucial M300, Plextor M7V, PNY CS1311, OCZ Trion 150, PNY CS2211, Plextor M6V, Crucial BX200, OCZ Trion 100, Kingston HyperX Savage, Crucial MX200, OCZ Vector 180, Kingston BX100, Samsung 850 EVO M.2, Samsung 850 EVO mSATA, AMD Radeon R7, Silicon Power Slim S80, Samsung SSD 850 EVO, OCZ ARC 100, SanDisk Ultra II, Crucial MX100, SanDisk Extreme Pro and Samsung SSD 850 PRO.
As I mentioned earlier, the MX300 M.2 is based on Marvell's 88SS1074B1 controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark tool measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its random read and write speeds using blocks 512K and 4K in size.
 Crucial MX300 M.2 525GB |
 Samsung SSD 850 EVO M.2 250GB |
According to Crucial, the 525GB version of the MX300 M.2 is capable of reading at 530 MB/s and writing at 510 MB/s. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the drive had no problems reaching these speeds in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write tests.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the MX300 M.2's read, write and burst speeds as well as its seek times and CPU usage.
Crucial MX300 M.2 525GB
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the MX300 M.2 had average read and write speeds of 384.4 MB/s and 262.5 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 382.9 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that, like most other TLC-based SSDs, the MX300 M.2 uses some sort of SLC caching (Dynamic Write Acceleration). The drive starts writing at about 375 MB/s and then drops to about 260 MB/s when the write operation exceeds the size of the cache.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the MX300 M.2's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 0.5KB to 8192KB and the total length set to 256MB.
 Crucial MX300 M.2 525GB |
 Samsung SSD 850 EVO M.2 250GB |
When tested with ATTO, the MX300 M.2's read speeds topped out at about 536 MB/s and its write speeds at 516 MB/s.
