Result and general impression …
The current Crucial MX300 525 GB M.2 SSD CT525MX300SSD4 provides good overall read and write values for a TLC SSD and offers as M.2 SSD on a tiny 22x80mm board the same performance, reliability, and data security, that we know from the full-size 2.5″ MX300 SATA SSDs.
The Crucial M.2 MX300 525 GB MLC Solid State Drive has been like the 2.5″ Crucial MX300 equipped with Marvell 88SS1074 controller and Micron 3D TLC NAND.
You can see again how important the benchmark diversity is for an overall performance evaluation. While one benchmark tool shows top values, the values break into in another tool. This is mainly because a SLC NAND buffer is aside the TLC NAND which ensures very high transfer rates for small amounts of data. With the latest firmware M0CR040 Crucial succeeds the interplay between TLC and SLC well, however you will find the MX300 performance still more at the bottom. We would still call it rather Crucial BX300, because it works adequately to the BX100 and BX200 and has no MLC NAND like the MX100 and MX200.
The Crucial MX300 M.2 with 525 GB is specified with 160 TBW (total/tera bytes written), representing 87 GB per day over a period of 5 years. These point is important not only for the warranty, but underline the very high durability of the NAND cells. Who like to know more about TBW, finds numerous data and formulas at Micron and in the JEDEC SSD specifications.
Furthermore the Crucial MX300 supports like the Crucial MX200 all important features like ECC, TRIM, Active Garbage Collection, SMART, Device Sleep Extreme Low Power Mode, Thermal Monitoring and additional high-end features like as 256-bit AES Encryption, TCG Opal 2.0, IEEE-1667, Microsoft eDrive compatibility, RAIN, Power Loss Protection and four layers exclusive data defense, as well as the previously mentioned dynamic write acceleration and the momentum cache function via the supplied Crucial Storage Executive tool.
As you can realize by the thermal image and the M.2 thermal video only the temperature increases at high benchmark load significantly higher, than at a 2.5″ SSD, since the heat sink in form of the SSD chassis is missing at the M.2 and mSATA SSDs. Thanks to integrated temperature control and overheating protection you can use it also in an ultrabook, notebook, tablet, or PC with M.2 slot with or without the above mentioned tips to improve the M.2 cooling.
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