As NAND Flash technology has continued to develop and solid state drive manufacturers push the envelope of controller speed, we have seen performance figures that approach, and even bump against, the threshold of SATA 3Gb/s bandwidth limitations. Although the theoretical throughput and thus the naming convention behind the technology is SATA300 or 300MB/s, due to control overhead and other factors the maximum speed is actually closer to 270MB/s, a loss of roughly 10%. In testing the WD SiliconEdge Blue last month, Shawn reported sustained read speeds in the 240MB/s to 250MB/s neighborhood across most benchmarks, a range that is quickly becoming typical for SATA 3Gb/s based SSDs to attain.

Thus the need for a new standard, SATA 6Gb/s, has been drafted and adopted by the Serial ATA International Organization, and is making its way into design specifications of new hardware. Just this year we have begun to see motherboard manufacturers implement chipsets from Intel and AMD adopting the new standard, such as the ASUS P7P55D-E Deluxe and MSI 890GXM-G65. However to date there has been only one solid state drive manufacturer to bring a SATA 6Gb/s product to market, Crucial with their C300 RealSSD series.


The Crucial C300 RealSSD is available in three different capacities, a 256Gb, 128Gb and most recently a 64Gb model. Featuring a new Marvel controller and parent company Micron MLC flash chips, the C300 offers SATA 6Gb/s connectivity with SATA 3Gb/s backwards compatibility, support for TRIM and SMART command sets and upgradable firmware in a standard 2½" size drive package.

Join me as I take a closer look at the Crucial 128Gb C300 RealSSD SATA 6Gb/s drive.