Crucial MX300 M.2 525GB Solid State Drive

Model: Crucial MX300 M.2 525GB Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: Crucial
Provided By: Reader Donations

Crucial is a global brand of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the largest memory and flash storage manufacturers in the world. The company's product lineup includes award-winning solid state drives (SSDs) and computer memory upgrades (DRAM) for more than 50,000 systems. These products have been qualified and approved by major original equipment manufacturers and every single module has been rigorously tested at the component and module level. Each SSD also undergoes over a thousand hours of prerelease validation testing and hundreds of qualification tests to ensure optimal reliability and performance.

This past summer, Crucial launched its latest mainstream SSD, the MX300. Built for speed and loaded with advanced features, the drive was powered by Marvell's 88SS1074B1 controller and was available with up to 2TB of Micron's 3D TLC NAND. To compensate for the slow write speeds typically associated with this type of NAND flash, the MX300 was equipped with Crucial's Dynamic Write Acceleration technology, which uses an adaptable pool of high speed, single-level cell flash memory to enable faster saves and file transfers.

Crucial has now launched the MX300 M.2. Designed for tablets and ultrabooks, this new addition to the MX300 line isn't much larger than a stick of gum. The MX300 M.2 is powered by the same 88SS1074B1 controller found in the 2.5-inch version of the drive and is available with up to 1050GB of Micron's 3D TLC NAND. The MX300 M.2 also shares many of the same features as its full size counterpart. In addition to Dynamic Write Acceleration, it offers AES 256-bit encryption, thermal and power loss protection, TRIM support and active garbage collection. The MX300 M.2 also uses technologies like Data Defense and Redundant Array of Independent NAND (RAIN) to increase security and protection of data to a level that’s not typically found in consumer-class SSDs.

The MX300 M.2 is available in 275GB, 525GB, and 1050GB capacities. For this review, we purchased the 525GB version of the drive which is capable of delivering up to 530 MB/s sequential read and 510 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 92,000 random read and 83,000 random write IOPS.

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the MX300 M.2 has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Crucial's new SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the MX300 M.2 have what it takes? Can it deliver the performance and features that we've come to expect from Crucial? Keep reading as we find out.