Performance
Performance has been measured on the Intel X79 platform based on Core i7 4930K processor and ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard with the latest BIOS/UEFI.
As usual we are testing SSD on a popular benchmarks like ATTO, CrystalDiskMark or AS SSD. Thanks to Futuremark Corporation we are also introducing PCMark8. PCMark8 is probably the best benchmark which is performing various tests based on a popular home and office applications.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
ATTO Disk Benchmark is showing us sequential transfers of the drive. In this case we can see maximum of 546MB/s read and 513MB/s write. Declared maximum speed of 512GB Crucial MX100 is up to 550MB/s read and 500MB/s write so I think that ATTO result is pretty good. We have to remember that results may vary depends from used SATA controller, motherboard chipset or even processor speed.
So far, so good. Let’s move to the benchmarks that are testing also random transfers.
CrystalDiskMark 3
CrystalDiskMark is also showing pretty good numbers. Especially random 4K read is great. It’s one of the highest results that I have seen on a SATA SSD. That’s especially good when you realize that most important in daily work are random read transfers. For sure it will speed up any PC making every gamer really happy.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD results are slightly lower but also here final result is great. Total score of 1115 is one of the highest available so SATA SSD nowadays. Not many SSD are able to reach bandwidth over 30MB/s in 4K read test. Also higher queue depth tests are good with over 300MB/s.
I hope that above numbers will be even higher when Crucial work some more on the SSD firmware. Our review sample came with the first release of firmware – MU01, which is fully stable and has no problems with performance. I’m just used to see firmware improvements for every Crucial SSD what is always bringing something good.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities
Anvil’s Storage Utilities is showing similar results to what we could see in AS SSD. Also here results are good but could be better. Anvil’s result table is also showing us access times to data at every test stage and IOPS ( Input/Output Operations per Second ). IOPS look pretty good as it’s really close to declared by Crucial values and not many drives are actually so close to declared specification in this test.
Overall results are better than we can see in most other SSD so we can’t complain at all.
PCMark8
As I already mentioned we are introducing PCMark8 to our benchmarks list. It’s a great system benchmark and probably the best one available. While testing SSD we are focusing mainly on the storage tests. As we can see on the above table there are various applications from Adobe and Microsoft but also couple of popular games like Battlefield 3 or World of Warcraft.
Crucial MX100 looks great in PCMark8. Average bandwidth of 194.34MB/s is including sequential and random transfers. In daily work there is more random transfers that’s why we rarely see higher numbers near 500MB/s what doesn’t mean we won’t see it at all.
Overall performance of Crucial MX100 512GB is high enough to say it’s one of the best SSD available on the market. I’m sure that all users will be satisfied with performance of these drives.
