Crucial MX 300 1TB Solid State Drive, if you’re in the market for a new hard drive if should be at the top of your list for options. With how inexpensive Solid State Drives have become the dollar per gigabyte has decreased that purchasing a 1TB drive isn’t out of the question anymore.
You can pick up the MX 300 1TB drive for roughly $269.99 (give or take a sale), I spent more than that on my first 250GB Solid State Drive. The price per Gigabyte in SSDs has decreased significantly that obtaining a decent amount of storage space is no longer out of the question.
When SSDs became popular you typically saw users using them as their operating system drives and using a mechanical hard drive as their storage drive. This provided them much faster loading speeds when turning on and off the PC. Now, we can easily use the SSD as our storage drives and utilize the performance of the SSD to achieve much better gaming experience.
If you’re a casual gamer you might be asking “do I really need a 1TB drive for games?”, in this day and age, 1 TB fills up fast, especially with games. If you only play one game at a time and install only one game at a time then you won’t have any issues, but honestly, who only has one game installed on their PC? Right now, I have The Elder Scrolls Online, World of Warcraft, Overwatch and Path of Exile installed and I’ve already accumulated over 150 GB of used space and that’s only with 4 games I haven’t even started to install my Steam games.
Developers are constantly pushing updates to their games nowadays not to mention the plethora of content that is being pushed out in the MMO and ARPG genres. So, the amount of space needed is always growing, so you’re going to want to make sure you always have space available for that next update release. With the Crucial MX300 you can do that without any concern.
Let’s get into some of the technical specs of the SSD.
Crucial offers a 3 year limited warranty on the drive. The limitation is that of how much data you write to the drive, with the MX300 1TB, you’re allowed to write up to 350TBs of data to the drive in a 3 year term, plenty of space for your typical gamer, I would even say a hardcore gamer.
The most important information, next to cost of course, is how fast can the drive read and write. I have my Crucial MX300 1TB SSD connected to a Sata 6GB/s controller and the speeds I got were very respectable. While they don’t top the charts by any means they more than certainly beat out a lot of the competitors.
My results do fall short of what Crucial has on their website, 530MB/s read and 510MB/s write. That being said, I have never had a piece of hardware actually meet or surpass a company’s claim. I went ahead and compared my results against others online and mine are very close in comparison, either slightly higher or slightly lower.
We could dive into much deeper technical stuff results such as server load response but I don’t find them necessary because when it comes to gaming, it’s widely different and the drive doesn’t work nearly as hard as it does in server situations. While gaming, a typical drive would see, roughly, 92% read activity and 8% write activity. So the important information when looking at a gaming drive is how fast it can access the information and how fast it can read/write.
As I said earlier, the speeds aren’t chart toppers, I would say they are slightly above the average, however, the cost of the drive plays a huge factor in determining if the drive is worth it. At under $0.30 a gig, this drive out performs its competitors at that price point which should place this drive at the top of your choices if you’re looking for a new SSD.
Editor's Note: Ryan was provided with a review unit of this drive for this article. He was asked to review its performance from the perspective of a gamer and IT professional.
