Crucial E100: This controller uses the “secret” budget SSD 10 comments
Image: crucial
Techconseil recently reported on the crucial E100 for the first time. The budget SSD with very low TBW values was launched without any official introduction or technical details. The editorial team was now at least able to find out which controller is in the E100.
Crucial E100 uses SM2268XT2
Upon request to the news agency responsible for Crucial, they discovered that a controller from Silicon Motion is used in the Crucial E100. More specifically, it should be the SM2268XT2, a newer version of the SM2268XT that was introduced almost two years ago.
Behind it is a cost-effective 4-channel controller that supports PCIe 4.0 X4 and NVME 2.0. It has two R8 ARM cores and can handle memory chips that run up to 3,600 Mt/s. There is no dedicated DRAM cache, but the NVME host memory buffer function is supported.
SM2268XT (Image: Silicon Motion)
The chip, manufactured in 12nm, is available in an 84.7mm² package. Silicon Movement specifies maximum performance for SSDs with the SM2268XT2 at 7,400 MB/s for sequential reading and 6,700 MB/s for sequential writing. A maximum of 1.2 million PIO should be possible for random reading and writing.
However, the Crucial E100 only makes limited use of this potential, as this SSD is expected to max out at 5,000 MB/s for sequential reading and 4,500 MB/s for sequential writing.
The Kingston NV3 uses the same chip
An example of the use of the SM2268XT2 is the Kingston NV3, which performed quite well and efficiently in testing, but was criticized for SLC cache and thermal throttling when writing.
QLC memory very likely
Whether the Crucial E100 uses the less durable QLC memory has not yet been confirmed by the manufacturer. However, given the budget guidance and extremely low total bytes written (TBW) as a write limit, QLC-NAND can be expected to cause early loss of collateral. The entries in the price comparison therefore tentatively speak of QLC-NAND of the 176-layer generation from Micron.
TBW-Vergleich Einiger NVME-SSDS MIT QLC-SPEICHER MODELL 5XX GB 1 TB 2 TB 4 TB CRUMIAL E100 (QLC) 60 TB 80 TB 100 TB – P310 crucial (QLC) 110 TB 220 TB 440 TB – WD BLUE SN5000 (TLC / Qlc) 300 TB (TLC) 600 TB (TLC) 900 TB (TLC) 1,200 TB (QLC) Kingston NV2 (TLC / QLC) 160 TB 320 TB 640 TB 1,280 TB CRUMIAL P3 (QLC) 110 TB 220 TB 440 TB 800 TB TB P3 (QLC) P3 more crucial (QLC) 110 TB 220 TB 440 TB 800 TB CORSAIR MP600 CORE (QLC) – 225 TB 450 TB 900 TB Intel / solidigm 670p (QLC) 185 TB 370 TB 740 TB –
Hard drive replacement at a low price
The Crucial E100 is advertised as a cheap hard drive replacement. At the moment, the minimum prices are around 36 euros for 480 GB and 55 euros for 1 TB. In terms of price, the crucial E100 is on par with the Kingston NV3 and is one of the affordable SSDs with PCIe 4.0.
Topics: Crucial Flash Storage M.2 NVME SSD Storage Source: Own
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