The copycat SSD bursts into laughing due to even the original solid state drive imitating the surface solid state.

After seeing enough of the bottomless line of the copycat products, it is no surprising to discover surface solid state and Buddhist solid state.  Even if it is found to be a fake, it is not uncommon for a person to have the mentality of "can use it". But can you imagine that there is also a "surface solid" in the solid state drive of the original factory? At first, the empty running score is all right, later getting slower and slower. The surface solid state BX500 is coming!

Micron, which always has high cost-effective products, recently has launched the Crucial BX500, literally the successor to the MLC BX300. But ridiculously, the BX500 is not an upgrade or even a performance degradation, with the main control scheme and the external DRAM cache smaller.

The picture above is the BX500 disassembly diagram. The BX500 is not only the first Micron SSD with plastic shell, but also the first Micron SSD with a small PCB. What’s more, it is the first Micron SSD with no external DRAM cache scheme. Can it save a lot of money by shrinking it?

Fortunately, the BX500 still retains the same second-generation 64-layer stacked 3D TLC flash memory as the MX500, without using the rumored QLC flash. The single Die capacity is 256Gb, and each flash particle is packaged with two Dies. There are 4 flash particles on both sides of PCB, making up 256GB capacity. After deducting 17% of the reserved space for the secondary OP, the nominal capacity is 240GB (about 223GB is actually available after formatting thanks to the decimal system).

Although the empty running score of Micron BX500 is not good, at least it can be seen:

Once the file is stored in the disk, the AS SSD Benchmark will be dropped immediately:

On an empty disk, a storage score of the BX500 240G PCMark 8 is 4826, which is about 80 points lower than the Toshiba TR200 240G. In spite of a lower performance level, it is still acceptable for its low price.

When a third of its full capacity is written into the disk, the BX500's PCMark 8 storage score will drop by about 100 points which should be the worst in the original SSD. An enhanced version of SanDisk already shrunk into the main control of flash memory disk is estimated to be stronger than it.

Actually no external DRAM cache is the main reason for the BX500's slowdown. Toshiba TR200, similarly designed with no external cache, is a typical example. The TR200 is controlled by Toshiba TC58NC1010GSB and also equipped with Toshiba 64-layer stacked 3D TLC flash memory. In terms of hardware configuration, there is many similarities to the BX500.

However, after space usage increasing, the TR200 doesn’t slow down as much as the BX500. Moreover, it won’t shrink the shell into a plastic one just because it is an entry-level product. In particular, there is a thermal pad on the main control, which may not increase too much cost, but obviously better than the BX500.

Some friends perhaps quest why storage geeks is to blame the Micron plastic shells. The answer is as following. The biggest difference between plastic and metal is that the metal shell can cooperate with the thermal paste to quickly dissipate the heat generated by the main control through the shell while the plastic is easy to accumulate heat. Especially, Micron's Crucial BX500 also uses SMI master with high calorific value, so that the standby temperature is 10 degrees higher than that of Toshiba TR200 and a little test can make the temperature go to 70 degrees. The plastic shell is also an assist in that performance. The figure below shows the Toshiba TR200 in standby mode at 35 degrees and the BX500 at 45 degrees in the same environment without any work.

If the BX500 is to open the entry-level door of original factory, Micron is shrinking a bit too ruthless. At the moment, the price of Jingdong is completely uncompetitive. Storage geeks believe that it needs to drop at least tens of yuan to have a chance to compete with the Toshiba TR200.