Crucial C300 SATA 6Gb/s SSD Review
Introduction
Published: 23rd June 2010 | Source: Crucial | Price: £297.26 |
Introduction
Solid State Drives.
Hopefully by now we've all accepted that these are the absolute performance Kings. As much, if not larger, a part of your system as every other component. If you're running anything like a modern processor then you're losing huge performance just by sticking stubbornly to your old mechanical device. And yes, they are expensive, but so is everything that has this level of performance. Right. Hopefully all the "ooh but the GB per £ is ridiculous" brigade have either gone back to complaining about Steam-Powered Looms or joined the rest of us in the digital age, and those of us who welcome technology can move on.
When SATA 3Gb/s technology first emerged we were all stunned with both the bandwidth available and the ability to hot-swap. This was as much a leap forward as USB was and, short of having hot-swappable CPUs and GPUs, the last step needed to a truly plug and play system.
The thought that it was possible to need more bandwidth than we had available seemed ridiculous to those of us still just comprehending ATA-133. Times change though and when Solid State Drives were introduced it only took one or two revisions before we hit the limit of what was available.
Speed is addictive though. As you improve your system you notice the next item of hardware that is lagging behind and improve that. It's a never ending process. So if 200MB/s read speeds just aren't fast enough for you, perhaps you need to take a look at today's review, the Crucial C300 SATA 6Gb/s SSD.
Technical Specifications
The C300 cognomen should really tell you all you need to know. It's Crucial and does over 300MB/s read. Simple. Ok come back tomorrow when we'll have another review for you.
What?
Oh you want more than that? Okay. Here are the technical specifications courtesy of Crucial's excellent PDF.
| Capacity | 128GB Unformatted |
| NAND | Micron MLC |
| Controller | Marvell |
| Firmware | Field Upgradable |
| RAID | Yes |
| Interface | SATA 6Gb/s. Compatible with SATA 3Gb/s |
| Command Set | SMART and ATA-8 w/TRIM |
| Access Time | <0.1ms |
| Read Speed | 265MB/s SATA 3Gb/s and 355MB/s SATA 6Gb/s |
| Write Speed | 140MB/s SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 6Gb/s |
| Power Consumption | 1.7W Read, 3.1W Write, 0.092W Idle |
| Operating Temperature | 0°C to +70°C |
| Shock Resistance | 1500G |
| Warranty | Limited 3 Year |
Let's move on to the ever popular page two and see what we have to play with today.
Most Recent Comments
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Originally Posted by name='Warzone'
Indeed but all that blazing still burns a hole in the wallet
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Quotedid you know there is a firmware upgrade for these drives,
Release Date: 5/20/2010
Change Log:
Improved Power Consumption
Improved TRIM performance
Enabled the Drive Activity Pin (Pin 11)
Improved Robustness due to unexpected power loss
Improved data management to reduce maximum write latency
Improved Performance of SSD as it fills up with data
Improved Data Integrity
I can vouch for the improvments as Im running a pair on the marvell 6gb/s controller on the RE3
Im getting 450 reads and 250 writes !!
RickQuote
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Originally Posted by name='fmsam'
Cheers for the review TTL,
did you know there is a firmware upgrade for these drives, Release Date: 5/20/2010 Change Log: Improved Power Consumption Improved TRIM performance Enabled the Drive Activity Pin (Pin 11) Improved Robustness due to unexpected power loss Improved data management to reduce maximum write latency Improved Performance of SSD as it fills up with data Improved Data Integrity I can vouch for the improvments as Im running a pair on the marvell 6gb/s controller on the RE3 Im getting 450 reads and 250 writes !! Rick |
There are many ppl out there who are still under the impression that you cant use raid on the marvell 9128 6gb/s contoller on Rampage 3 !
Well do they really think Asus would drop such a clanger, when the board its competing against has the same chip and uses raid.
my advice to those ppl is shut up unless youve actually tried it.
http://i696.photobucket.com/albums/v...00raidsnip.png
RickQuote
I see you have 2 128 gb ssds i n raid 0
what knid of speeds do you get ?Quote
No wonder you have quick speeds with raid0, I was starting to think we had missed something huge with a firmware update! Ours came with the latest FW anyways I just checked.Quote
and crucial use garbage collection when raided and not trim, I test the drives every 3 days and they are actually getting faster, go figure !!Quote
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