Crucial MX300 (525GB & 1050GB) Solid State Drives Review

System Overview & Testing Procedures
The Crucial MX300 is your typical 2.5-inch solid state drive. For a full run-down of that it looks like be sure to check out our original review of the drive. For those wondering the drive is powered by the Marvell 88SS1074 controller. This 4-channel controller features ONFI 3/Toggle 2 support at 400MT/s, 256 AES encryption, and Low power support with integrated DEVSLP (Device Sleep). The NAND packages are Micron 3D TLC NAND packages.

Just like any 2.5-inch SATA solid state drives you just need to install them in your system and power it on. With the drives installed and formatted you have 489 GB of usable space on the 525 GB drive and 978 GB on the 1050 GB drive.

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Opening up CrystalDiskInfo we can see all of the information on each drive. You can see the drive supports S.M.A.R.T., APM, NCQ, TRIM, and DevSleep.

info2 info1

For testing the drive we will be using the following benchmarking programs, we have provided links to each so you can run the benchmarks on your drive for comparison.

HDTune Pro (download)
ATTO Disk Benchmark (download)
CrystalDiskMark 64bit (download)
AS SSD Benchmark (download)
Anvil Storage Utility Professional (download)
PCMark 8 – Storage Benchmark (download)
AIDA64 Storage Benchmark (download)

We also made these optimization changes…

– No power saving options in the BIOS
– ACHI enabled in the BIOS
– Windows 10 User Account Control (UAC) is disabled
– Windows 10 power saving settings are disabled

So let’s get into testing!

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