RealSSD C300 tested, offers sublime speed at superlative prices

It's been a few months since Micron became the second to introduce the world's first SATA 6Gbps hard drive (Seagate was the other), and regardless about who was earliest we now know which is currently the fastest. TweakTown put a Crucial-branded C300 through its paces and came to a rather simple conclusion: "At this point in time there is no other drive, platter or solid state that is in the same league as the Crucial RealSSD C300." It blitzed through all their tests and at the end, when others would be a smoking ruin of high access times, it still performed as good as new. There was one catch, though: Windows Media Player performance was abnormally low, something that testers believe is a glitch to be addressed in firmware. Other than that, if you want the best this is it. But can you afford it? A 128GB model will set you back $499, and the 256GB one is $799. Yeah, ouch.

[KAL326 Posted Feb 4th 2010 12:57PM]

The fastest has never been the cheapest, welcome to technology. Though I'm waiting to see what the 25nm chips will do to prices in the near future.

[merlin007 Posted Feb 4th 2010 1:13PM]

It may be the fastest SATA SSD... If you want real speed, go PCIe SSD. But then again, you'll pay even more!

[DanH Posted Feb 4th 2010 2:34PM]

@merlin007 and you wont be able to boot from it.

[riccochet Posted Feb 4th 2010 1:30PM]

One thing i've always wondered, is there any benefit what so ever to getting a couple of SSD drives and putting them in a RAID 0 configuration. They are pretty fast already, and the speed benefits of putting even traditional platter based hard drives in RAID 0 config is marginal i've found. Has this been benched at all?

[b3n Posted Feb 25th 2010 7:50AM]

@riccochet

Yes there is massive benefit. Ther are people on the OCZ forums hitting 900MBps with multiple SSDs in RAID:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?66483-AS-SSD-Benchmark-Screenshots-%28post-yours%29

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?69464-ATTO-Benchmark-Results-%28post-yours%29

[stickel87 Posted Feb 4th 2010 2:27PM]

$500 for the fastest hard drive really is not that bad considering many gamers spend that or more on top of the line video cards. And when it comes to performance as we all know the biggest bottleneck in most systems is the hard drive so $500 for top of the line is reasonable in my opinion.

[peter0328 Posted Feb 4th 2010 6:37PM]

@stickel87
It's not important for gamers at all because it will only decrease boot times/load times in their scenario.

It does not increase FPS by any noticeable/measurable margin.

[stickel87 Posted Feb 4th 2010 6:51PM]

@peter0328
True it doesnt help FPS at all but MMO gamers that play massive games such as World of Warcraft will see very significant increases in load times. And traveling in WoW is a lot about saving time and this would do so =)

[fisher Posted Feb 5th 2010 5:49AM]

@stickel87

I wouldn't buy anything that would increase load times for anything. lol.

[DanH Posted Feb 4th 2010 2:40PM]

This is an interesting article, but their benchmarks don't even include (arguably) the best SSD on the market, the Intel X-25M G2.

[b3n Posted Feb 25th 2010 7:53AM]

@DanH

Yeah. TweakTown didn't include any of the most popular, mainstream SSDs such as those from Intel and OCZ. So, not a very helpful benchmark, IMHO.

[Ghen Posted Feb 4th 2010 2:46PM]

$500 isn't bad actually, only a few beans above current drives. And you figure 6gb promotes a premium anyway...

Can't wait until everyone finally tips their hat in this direction :)

[Rounin Posted Feb 4th 2010 2:58PM]

Good to see this come out. I wonder what Intel has up their sleeves. Since the G2 is only a notch better than G1. The G3 should be a great competitor with sataIII. It should be a lot cheaper too since they're moving to 25nm.

[Nomecks Posted Feb 4th 2010 3:57PM]

It's not the fastest. It's fastest for sequential read and write, but if you look at the HDTune random 4k write benchmark (The only one that really matters for benching an OS drive), it's still 4x slower than an X25-M G2.

[Bandit5317 Posted Feb 4th 2010 5:51PM]

The sequential read and write speeds on one of these things are three times faster than my RAID0 setup.

[boggit Posted Feb 4th 2010 8:28PM]

Is everyone forgetting abotu the http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/11/18/ocz_colossus/

collosus 1tB!!!!!!!!!! MEGA SPEEDS

[b3n Posted Feb 25th 2010 7:56AM]

I prefer AnandTechs article about this SSD:

http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3747&p=3