Crucial MX100 Overview
The Crucial MX100 comes in the 2.5-inch form factor that we are used to seeing for solid state drives. The drive chassis is made of metal and silver with a “MX” sticker on the top. There are also four mounting holes on top of the drive.
Flipping the drive over we can see four screws that hold it together. If you choose to remove these screws to look inside we do warn you that, that will void your warranty. There is a sticker on the back of the drive that does let us know all of the model numbers, capacity, etc.
This drive has your typical SATA power and data connections on the far side.
The drive itself is only 7mm thin, but Crucial does include a 7mm to 9.5mm spacer if you happen to need it. There are two mounting holes on each side of the drive.
Before we continue we do want to warn you that opening your drive will void your warranty. We open solid state drives to show you what is inside, but you have no reason to open yours. Getting inside the MX100 is quite simple, remove the four screws that are on the back and pop the back off. You will find the PCB inside face down.
To get a better look at the PCB we can remove four more screws and take it completely out.
Taking a closer look at the PCB we can see that the drive is powered by the Marvell 88SS9189 controller and a 512MB LPDDR2-1067 SDRAM chip. This SDRAM chip is used as the controllers system memory.
There are a total of 16 (8 front / 8 back) NAND chips on the PCB. These are Micron 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND chips. Due to the size of the 128Gbit NAND the write performance of the lower capacity drivers (128GB, 512GB) takes a hit. Basically having a higher capacity die means that fewer dies are needed to make up lower capacity drives. This reduces parallelism, which is the key to performance of solid state drives in the first place. Luckily we have the 512 GB version of the drive so we will not see this.
