Crucial MX300 SSD 750GB: More power efficient and reliable

The new 2.5-inch 7mm MX300 750GB Limited Edition from Crucial uses the groundbreaking 3D NAND flash technology from Micron (compare to the predecessor Crucial MX200). At the moment, it’s only available in 750GB capacity (hence the limited edition) but expect more to come later this year. Micron was the first company to employ floating gate cell technology in 3D NAND, which gives better performance, quality, and reliability (if you don’t really care about the tech jargons).

According to a spec sheet from Crucial, Micron 3D NAND is engineered with larger NAND cells that improve performance and prolong endurance. This has resulted in sequential reads/writes up to 530/510 MB/s on all file types and an endurance rating of up to 220TB total bytes written (equal to 120GB per day for 5 years – but if you don’t play with 150GB of data every day, then the drive will definitely last a long while!).

Crucial MX300 750GB Limited Edition comes with a 7mm to 9.5mm spacer and Acronis True Image HD license key to migrate your old data to the new. Assuming you are still using a good, old Hard Disk Drive (HDD), migrating your whole Windows system to Crucial’s SDD is going to be painless with Acronis’ help. Or in my case, I have it as an extra drive so I simply plug the MX300 on the 6Gbps SATA3 connector on my motherboard.

We all know how fast SSD flies and the MX300 does not disappoint. According to CrystalDiskMark software that I used to test the MX300, it’s capable to 534MB/s read and 509MB/s write speed on sequential data (as Crucial has pointed out in the spec sheet).

Compared to the older MX200, it may not look much different at first glance and shows that MX200 is slightly faster – which shocked me at first:

However, the main strength of the new Crucial MX300 is that it’s much more power efficient, especially under load. Definitely make a huge difference in a laptop, especially if you do lots of heavy-duty work (photo and video editing, gaming, etc) with it. According to Crucial, the MX300 uses only 0.075W of power (a typical hard drive uses 6.8W), though TheSSDReview writes that it only uses 0.036W of power when it’s idling. According to Legit Reviews, the older MX200 uses 0.195W of power on idle. So, calling the MX300’s power efficiency “an improvement” is an understatement by far! The MX300 will prolong your laptop’s battery life and you’ll be thankful for it.

The 3D NAND technology allows manufacturers to pack more storage capacity in the hardware – increasing power efficiency, durability, and basically more GB with less dollars. Expect an MX300 with Terrabytes capacity soon without having to shell out as much cash as you did before.

If you are just storing data (like your music or media collections), obviously you’ll get more out of buying a good, old hard disk drive. But even with one of the fastest hard disk drives around like my WD Black 6TB, you’ll still get much less performance compared to the Crucial MX300 SSD”

Crucial MX300 (750GB, Limited Edition) is slightly slower compared to the predecessor MX200, despite it being a newer generation on the MX line-ups. However, it is highly power efficient compared to the MX200 which gives you a significantly better battery life on your laptop. The drive lasts longer, more reliable, and Crucial can also pack more storage, all thanks to the new 3D NAND technology. On a desktop, the benefit of being more power-efficient may not be felt as much, but we definitely love the drive being more reliable and having more endurance.

And then, you also get all the features Crucial has packed to further increase its value such as a full hardware encryption (government grade AES 256-bit), Dynamic Write Acceleration, Exclusive Data Defense, and more. The Crucial MX300 750GB SSD comes with a 3-year warranty and costs around AU $299.

Disclosure: Review sample was supplied for reviewing but all opinions are mine

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