Morning All! There's been a bunch of discount deals on Crucial BX200 SSDs of various sizes. Tempting, but my research has uncovered a less-desirable "feature" of these drives which I wanted to share. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say (though if you are a regular bit-tech.net reader then you probably already know all this!) In short, it seems TLC NAND is a bit slow, but it's dense and cheap(er) than MLC or SLC. So manufacturers augment it with some fast cache. On a 480GB BX200 it's 512MB but on the 240GB it's even smaller. Under normal use (booting, loading games etc) the drive is just as fast as any. Indeed, they generally all hit the 500MB/sec odd ceiling of SATA6 these days. But for BIG file transfers (copying HD video, for example) once you fill that 0.5GB buffer, speeds plummet to maybe 80MB/sec! This probably won't ruin your day, but it is something to be aware of. Maybe spend an extra £10-20 on a non-TLC drive... Are there any BX200 owners that would care to comment on real-world performance? (epeen aside, anyone moving from a hard drive to SSD will be blown away, so even a BX200 is better than nowt!)
