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Crucial MX300 525GB SSD Review

Storage/SSD by stefan @ 2016-09-25

The MX300 525GB SSD from Crucial is marketed as a mainstream product and unlike the regular TLC drives where we have experienced high write performance drops (to about 90MB/s) when transferring large files, the 3D TLC NAND is able to deliver higher writes even after the cache is filled. This is Crucial’s first 3D NAND generation in cooperation with Intel and we expect further to see improvements with firmware upgrades.

A Closer Look Contd.

Right after taking apart the top cover, we will get to see the drive PCB, which actually takes half of the total free space inside the chassis:

One of the PCB sides does feature two 3D NAND packages with do sport the 6HB22 NW953 inscriptions; to be more exact, this is a 32-layer 384Gbit (48GB) die, one package having a total of 144GB:

The other side reveals the rest of the two packages; if we do have 144GB per package, we do total 576GB. This is quite an odd capacity number and Crucial does leave the user with 525GB, the rest being utilized for over-provisioning:

A 512MB DDR3 cache chip is also present here:

MX300 controller is a Marvell 88SS1074 which is a 4-channel part and comes with LDPC (low-density parity check). We do also get nice features like encryption support, SLC caching but also partial power loss protection (last feature is thanks to the multiple SMD capacitors installed on the drive):

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