Crucial's 6Gbps RealSSD C300 goes on sale, costs as much as a decent laptop
By Vlad Savov 
posted February 25th 2010 6:51AM
posted February 25th 2010 6:51AM
[Thanks, Rick]
posted February 25th 2010 6:51AM
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Not to be the complete ass here but I think I'll stick with Intels SSD's.... Cheap and quality. Just my opinion though.
@Soothesayer I think Intel and Micron make all their SSDs at the same fab (Crucial is a subsidiary of Micron). I think it's called IM-Flash (or something like that).
@The Shen Thanks for the heads up then. :P
It's probably more likely to be an i25 or i27.. you know how much Intel hates those even numbers in their new linup
Crucial rocks! I'm just glad they are in the game.
why are more companys starting to use Gb instead of GB or Mb instead of MB?
@OCEAN CLAK
Not sure if my last message sent, my internet just failed on me (I hate my connection at University)
The standard way of writing a size is GB and the standard way of writing a speed is Gbps. I have not seen any companies stray from this, so where are you getting that from?
@OCEAN CLAK I read "GB" and as far as I know there is a difference between "B" = Byte, "b" = bit, isn't it?
I think companys like using "b" because of the higher numbers they can claim with?
@Kaboof
yeah 8x higher with small ''b''
@OCEAN CLAK
/me schoolz j00
Gb = gigabits
GB = Gigabytes
8 bits in 1 byte z0n.
BTW this drive is sick, I'm gonna have to demo one...
For the price though you would think they would put a 6Gb SAS controller on there instead of SATA.
because speed is illusive, so artificially inflating the number by using a smaller multiplier has been the staple. That and, NOTHING moves gigabytes per second. Okay, RAM, cache, processors and video cards aside, nothing that stores data non-volatile does.. Call it a lesson in "significant figures" per category of computing.
@TrumanHW u should add "nothing actual in the mainstream market" because im pretty sure we will be moving gigabytes per second too... question is just when.
What has to happen for SSD's to come down in price to compete with conventional hard drives?
@acedrums What for? HDDs dont compete with SSDs in terms of performance and never will. For OS and programs you use a SSD, for storage you use a HDD. Simple as that. Prices will come down but long before you get the same $/GB ration from a SSD it will have been replaced by a better technology that requires less effort to keep it performing at good levels - and of course durability. MRAM comes to mind, for example.
@acedrums Not any time soon. We can hope to see cheaper SSDs with the new manufacturing process by Q4 2010.
But I wouldn't wait until they reach per GB parity with HDDs either. Just affordable enough to the OS and programs, or all the files I need on the laptop. It's not some incremental upgrade; it's a totally new level of snappiness.
@Bahumbug Agree except that many people don't need 'storage'. I have a 100GB drive in this machine, it has plenty of free space, no problem. Basically depends whether you download video or install games; if you don't, you probably don't need much storage.
Right now SSD is still too expensive for most manufacturers to ship as the standard drive. It's not cost-per-GB that is the critical factor but cost-for-reasonable-number-of-GB: when 128GB SSDs drop enough in price, they will still be hugely more expensive than 500GB of HD, but will be suitable for inclusion in new PCs. Right now you can get about 40GB for a reasonable price, which doesn't leave you much after an OS install and core software. When that reaches 128 I think it'll be much more commonly used.
Agree that more manufacturers will also start shipping systems with a smallish SSD (64GB?) plus large HD.
Not a very useful benchmark, IMHO.
TweakTown didn't even bench it against the most popular, mainstream SSDs e.g. Intel, OCZ Vertex/Turbo/Colossus etc.
@b3n Thats exactly what I thougt as well. I dont think that drive will have much going for it other than the interface. However, I dont care about sequential read/write peformance beyond the 250/110MB/s I get from my X-25M. Its the random access performance that counts for me.
@Bahumbug
Yeah - I just found an article at AnandTech from the 19th Feb where they examine the C300. The AnandTech article is better :) Oh and they DO say the C300 is pretty awesome.
@Bahumbug
D'oh. Forgot to include the link: http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3747
@b3n But pricey. Even Anand thought $500 was a tad too high in this market - I mean it's bloody fast but I might want to save $250 and go with a Solid 2, which is decent enough, or the X25M G2 and trade off some HDD space.
@YpoCaramel
Yeah - I'm happy enough with my Vertex Turbo 120GB for now. Last bench I did reported Seq. Read: 250Mbps Seq. Write: 160Mbps
For once, I bought at exactly the right time - I paid £325. One month later it was £450 from the same online retailer! O_o
So its going to be just slightly more expensive then the a GTX480. So go with this and a couple of cards from ATI. Probably make for a better gaming rig.
Anything less than a 500GB drive is too small IMHO.
Did they ever resolve that issue with SSD "memory" issue where you can only read/write so many times?
@boe no they didn't. But i read an article once were they said as companys claim to get at least 10million (i hope i remember right) writes... which they said would be take like 10 or 20 years to reach with 24/7 full speed access.. since then that doesn't seem like a problem to me anymore.
@Kaboof Thanks - that is good to know. I typically only keep a drive 5 years so that would be OK with me.
@boe
It seems to me that hard drives are disposable anyway. In 3-4 years, you'll want to replace your pathetic 128GB drive for a faster, cheaper 1TB SSD anyway.
@boe SSDs use chips which do 'wear levelling' to ensure that the load is spread out all over the different bits of memory (if each one is rated for x thousand writes, it will arrange files such that even if you keep writing and deleting something, it doesn't end up writing the same block x thousand times and killing it).
So the usage lifetime etc is highly predictable, I think you can ask the firmware how long you've got left in some drives. :)
Don't go half ass, you have to buy at least 4 of these and wire them up in a RAID 10 if you really want to flex your muscle.
Well, it doesn't really matter unless you have the channel speed on the motherboard up to par to handle the transfer rate from the HDD.
Unless this is a PCIExpress 2.0 x16 lane it will not be able to push all those 6Gbs. If it is a 8x all it can do is 4Gbs theoretically, which in real life is closer to 3.2-3.4Gbs.
Just a thought on where to spend the moolah
@ClosetNerd
I think you are confused. PCIe is 250MBps full duplex per lane. 16x lanes of PCIe is 4GB(ytes)ps not 4Gb(its)ps. PCIe 2.0 x16 is 8GBps.
Bits and bytes; Important differentiation. A PCIe 2.0 x1 slot provides 500MBps full duplex, which would be fine for this.
@James5mith
You are correct sir!
Sweden's hockey team lost yesterday in the Olympics...that is my excuse :)
Using a proper 4K boundary aware OS (read: anything not Windows XP) this drive does 161MBps RANDOM writes. Not sequential, not reads, WRITES. That's insane, and blows the previous record holder (Intel X25-M G2) out of the water by over 100MBps of throughput.
This drive is insanely expensive, but with the right software, it's also the fastest thing out there, hands down.
@James5mith
Followup: Where I'm getting my info from.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3747&p=10
@Vaio
I don't know what you just said, but you should certainly post more often...
I'm going to be buying one of these almost immediately. It will sit idle in my drawer until the new MacBook Pros are released.... Then i'll pop the new one in!