Computex is officially kicking off today and unlike many of the products announced at trade shows, we actually have a full review of the Crucial MX100 that is launching today at Computex. The MX100 is Crucial's new mainstream drive, replacing the popular M500 while the M550 will continue to serve the higher performance market. With the MX100 Crucial is aiming even lower in terms of price per gigabyte by utilizing Micron's (i.e. Crucial's parent company's) state-of-the-art 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND. In fact the MX100 is the first mainstream product to use 16nm NAND and it's the smallest process node we have seen since Toshiba's/SanDisk's introduction of their A19nm NAND.

As we have discussed before, decreasing the lithography is the most effective way for NAND manufacturers to cut costs. The smaller lithography translates into smaller transistor size, which in turn means that the same amount of storage can be fit into a die that is physically smaller -- or you can fit more storage while keeping the die size the same. The smaller the die size, the more dies are received from each wafer, which reduces the production costs because you are basically getting more dies from the wafer without added cost. Well, almost.

For the past couple of years, every new lithography has reduced the profits and benefits that the die shrink brings. Sure the manufacturers still get more dies per wafer, but the investments required to research and manufacture the NAND have increased hand in hand with the die shrinks, making every die shrink less profitable than the previous. Furthermore, every die shrink introduces more endurance and reliability concerns because as you scale the cell, it becomes harder and harder to hold the electrons in the floating gate. That's why all major NAND manufacturers are researching 3D NAND as it will put an end (at least temporarily) to the scaling game since density can be increased by adding layers. I'll talk a bit more about the state of the NAND market and 3D NAND on the next page.

The MX100

The short summary is that the MX100 builds on the same architecture as the M500 and M550. The only fundamental difference is the NAND inside as the controller is the same Marvell 88SS9189 silicon as found inside the M550. The 9189 is a minor upgrade over the 9187 and what it does is provide better support for DevSLP along with some bandwidth optimizations.

The design of the chassis and PCB remain unchanged as well, although the naming changes from Mxxx to MXxxx. I'm guessing Crucial had to change the naming because M600 would have been confusing given that the M550 will remain in the market as Crucial's high-end drive. Other than performance, Crucial is bringing some differentiation by offering limited capacities as the MX100 will only be available at up to 512GB, so those who want a larger drive will now have to pay for the M550.

Crucial MX100 Specifications
Capacity 128GB 256GB 512GB
Controller Marvell 88SS9189
NAND Micron 16nm 128Gbit MLC
DRAM      
Sequential Read 550MB/s 550MB/s 550MB/s
Sequential Write 150MB/s 330MB/s 500MB/s
4KB Random Read 80K IOPS 85K IOPS 90K IOPS
4KB Random Write 40K IOPS 70K IOPS 85K IOPS
Endurance 72TB (~65GB/day for 3 years)
Encryption AES 256-bit, TCG Opal 2.0 & IEEE-1667
Warranty Three years

Due to the use of 128Gbit NAND, the write performance at smaller capacities takes a hit. I covered the reasons behind this in detail in the M550 review but in short the higher capacity per die means that fewer die are needed to achieve a certain capacity. This in turn reduces parallelism, which is the key of SSD performance in the first place. A single NAND die isn't very fast, but when you have multiple dies working in parallel, the performance adds up and you get hundreds of megabytes of throughput.

Feature wise the MX100 matches the M500 and M550. Both power loss protection and hardware encryption (including TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 standards) are supported and the endurance rating remains at the same 72TB despite the change in NAND. Micron wouldn't give us the exact P/E cycle rating for their 16nm NAND but I was told that the endurance is similar to their 20nm MLC NAND. Even if there is a slight reduction in raw NAND endurance, it's possible to compensate for that by reducing the write amplification through firmware optimizations. RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent NAND) is also included to protect against page/block level failures and the parity ratio remains at 127:1 similar to the M550 (i.e. one bit of parity is generated for every 127 bits of user data).

IMFT's 16nm NAND & the State of 3D NAND
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  • juhatus - Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - link

    Does the Samsung XP941 use Samsung's 3D NAND? Availability at least would fit as the first drive's where seen last Q3/13 on OEM machines..
  • juhatus - Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - link

    To answer for my own question: Yes and that also explains XP941's rarity

    http://english.etnews.com/device/2963105_1304.html
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - link

    So far Samsung has only been sampling 3D NAND SSDs to enterprise OEMs, although they have just started providing some to the PC OEMs with the new 32-layer NAND. The XP941 is still regular MLC but Samsung it's only available for OEMs.
  • Samus - Thursday, June 5, 2014 - link

    I've installed over 100 M500's and have personally been using a C300 since 2010 in my daily driver laptop. Rock solid drives. Who cares if they're 10% "slower" than a Sandforce drive.
  • Onyx2291 - Thursday, June 5, 2014 - link

    Just ordered a 512GB for $199.99. Such good value.
  • beatsbyden - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link

    Great bargain for the price. I heard the 256GB drive is in fact a 320 GB drive with 20% overprovisioning...that would even be more a bargain. Performance decrades less than with all other brands that only have 7%. I also like the protection and encryption on the mx 100. Still have to chose between the samsung 840 evo 250gb and the mx100. Would chose the mx100 if had better writing performance...but now i have doubts...Gonna use it for audioproduction...so lots of reads and writes that would make the samsung evo 840 a better choice right....i have a Samsung 830 128GB now and i'm satisfied with it, never failed me, but need a bigger one. Should i stick with Samsung or get the MX 100?
  • SpartanTech - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link

    Get the 512GB MX100, should satisfy your needs and provides even more storage....

    PS: Don't think you'll notice any difference tbh
  • Canadaram - Wednesday, October 22, 2014 - link

    Because Crucial is a direct seller as well as a wholesaler, they can set the MSRP much closer to wholesale/street pricing levels, so don't expect as large of a discount from MSRP to street as you would on retail brands.
  • akin1231 - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link

    This drive is not a steal, it's a massive rip off because it doesn't work reliably. There's a massive issue with it falling off intermittently but frequently. There's no fix for it yet. Check the Crucial forum:
    http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/MX100-wil...

    I bought 3 of these... I'm a sucker
  • fossxplorer - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link

    Good and very important info.

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