[section_title title=”Introduction & Closer Look”]
Introduction & Closer Look
Brand: Crucial
Model: MX200 250GB SATA III
UK Price: £77.76 each @ Amazon UK (At time of review)
US Price: $81.72 each @ Amazon US (At time of review)
Following on from our previous RAID0 performance comparison with 4 x Western Digital 6TB Red mechanical hard drives, we figured, why not do one showing off SSD performance? To kick it up a notch, however, we decided to add RAID1 into the mix too and to go even further, we got hold of an LSI Mega RAID card to show absolute performance for you all. No bottlenecks, yay!
So what will be doing the testing on today? Well Crucial were kind enough to send us four of their awesome MX200 250GB SSDs in to allow us to show off the performance of RAID0/RAID1. Not only is high-speed storage a much more affordable feat due to widespread competition in the storage market, but with NVMe 951 M.2 drives breaking their way into the scene, the quest for performance is on! Back in the day, RAID with WD Raptor HDDs was the in “thing” and many enthusiasts used to brag about their speeds, their seek time and so forth; but that was then, this is now, the SSD with its NAND technology is at the forefront of storage technology.
The Crucial MX200 follows in the footsteps of the previous MX model, the MX100. With the same Marvell 88SS9189 controller as the MX100, the MX200 is of the 7mm form factor and now features AES 256-bit encryption for added security. So, as we have said, we don’t have 1 of them, we have 4 of them to test…
So why are we doing this? Well people love performance and RAID aren’t just a way of enhancing that, but it can also offer redundancy in ways in which a singular drive just cannot do; not on its own anyway! RAID has been a well-utilised tool over the years for doing what has just been said above, but a lot of people avoid it due to RAID0’s increased risk of data loss thanks to “striping” and let’s be honest, RAID1 is only a mirror and although a performance boost is apparent (sometimes more than RAID0), it loses out massively on writing. Writing to SSD’s isn’t something that is done too often though unless used with tasks such as video production, content creation, and rendering etc.
Another reason why we are doing this is because we can, so you don’t have to! It can be a somewhat expensive “lesson” to learn just for some extra performance, but hopefully after this, you will see the performance benefits from using RAID with SSD’s, not just on the whole, but more specifically with Crucial’s MX200 250GB models.
Let’s crack on then shall we?
