Judging by the performance numbers SSD manufacturers have been getting from some of their latest drives, the SATA 6Gb/s standard could not have come soon enough. With most drives topping out at an interface-limited ~270MB/s, the Crucial C300 RealSSD with its Marvell 6Gb/s controller blows away the competition with up to a claimed 355MB/s read speed and 140MB/s write. From what we've seen in our own testing those numbers aren't very far off the mark either, with most benchmarks yielding between 320MB/s and 330MB/s sequential reads and 135MB/s to 145MB/s writes on our test AMD platform. Aside from a RAID SSD configuration, these are the fastest read numbers we have ever tested.
Unfortunately the 128Gb version of C300 has significantly slower write speeds than the 256Gb model, with only about 66% of the same performance, while the entry level 64Gb writes at just 33% of the same speed. Read performance is rated the same across all three.
Crucial seems to target the C300 towards notebook users with their installation guide and product documentation, however after a brief search online I was unable to find any laptops that actually support the SATA 6Gb/s standard. Likewise for the price of the C300 you might expect a 2½" to 3½" adapter be included but this is not the case, despite new desktop motherboards supporting the SATA 6Gb/s speed and add-in PCI-E cards readily available for those with older systems. This is not to say of course that the new standard won't be adopted by notebook manufacturers, but given that the drive is available before there are any laptops that can take full advantage of it, the C300 will likely see a higher degree of popularity initially among the enthusiast desktop crowd.
I'm a little concerned about the apparent slower than average access times reported by both AS SSD and SiSoft Sandra tests, and to some extent the Microsoft Experience Rating as well. I tried several things to improve these, including wiping and reinstalling the OS from scratch, using the C300 as a secondary data-only drive, changing SATA cables, and also tried removing the Icy Dock converter since it relocates the SATA connectors, and plugging the cable directly into the Crucial drive itself. None of these things had any effect on the access times.
At time of review, the Crucial 128Gb C300 retails for $400 and can be found online for around 5-10% less. This puts it right inline with other manufacturers high-end 100Gb to 128Gb SATA 3Gb/s solid state drives, however at a sometimes significant write speed disadvantage. It seems Crucial can get 200MB/s+ writes out of the Marvell controller with the 256Gb version of the C300 so it would be nice if that same speed were available on the 128Gb and 64Gb versions as well. Of course, nothing else can touch the SATA 6Gb/s read bandwidth these drives are capable of, since Crucial seems to have a monopoly on the market right now.
- UPDATE - Since this review, Crucial has really slashed prices on the RealSSD series. The 128Gb model can now be found for $300 or less, sometimes in the $260-$270 range.
OCIA.net awards the Crucial 128Gb C300 RealSSD SATA 6Gb/s drive our Gold Seal of Approval.
