Crucial's MX100 is one of the best-selling SSDs on the market, and probably the most awesome, too. Now, Crucial has added a more affordable model to their lineup with the BX100 (B stands for budget). In order to meet their new price point, Crucial opted for a flash controller by Silicon Motion instead of the Marvel chip on the rest of their lineup. While I was skeptical at first about whether the SM2246 controller could perform well, our real life testing shows that the performance loss is very small. Compared to the MX100, the BX100 is just 1% slower on average; vs. the new MX200, the gap widens to 4 %. But even 4% is not much, and I doubt you'll be able to notice the difference in day-to-day usage without using a stop watch. What I also find noteworthy is the excellent MySQL performance, which could qualify this drive as a good option for a database server.
With a current retail price of $100 for the tested 250 GB variant, the BX100 is the cheapest high-end drive on the market as it actually claims the number one spot of our performance-per-dollar and price-per-gigabyte charts.
Personally, I would still buy the MX100 because its price is just too good, and saving $5 on the 250 GB variant really is not worth it deviating from the nearly perfect MX100. Things might be different if Crucial were to somehow bring the BX100's price tag below $100, near the $90 mark. Yet the BX100 is an awesome option if every dollar matters, or when building a cost-optimized system for relatives and friends where performance is not so important.