Crucial C300 RealSSD Getting Closer To $2/Gb

It wasn’t so long ago that many were looking at SSDs at the $3/Gb mark and stating that they would buy once the price of SSDs was down to $2/Gb. With Crucial’s price drop on their RealSSD C300 128Gb SSDs today ($259US /$269Cdn) we are becoming very close with this SSD now dipping to $2.02/Gb US and $2.10/Gb Cdn respectively at NewEgg. When you factor in that the C300 is a SATA III SSD which provides a bit of ‘futureproof’ comfort, this is sure to be an attractive purchase for many.

Now lets throw another curve in their for ya. Many will look at the specs and observe that the C300 benchmarks, in both SATA II and SATA III mode, have write speeds of only 140MB/s and this may raise a few eyebrows in comparison to the SandForce controller equipped SSD releases. Recently The SSD Review put the C300 up against the Intel X25, the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro (SandForce controller) as well as a Samsung hard drive (thrown in for good measure) and you might just want to take a peak at what we found in real world and simulated real world testing. Are maximum sequential write speeds a bit deceiving perhaps? Of course they are and we explain why in ‘The Manufacturers Bluff‘, an article in our SSD Buyers Guide. Enjoy the read!!

Sequential Access – Read:

355MB/sec (SATA 6Gb/s) 265MB/sec (SATA 3Gb/s)

Sequential Access – Write:

140MB/sec (SATA 6Gb/s) 140MB/sec (SATA 3Gb/s)

Power Consumption (Active):

1.7W READ, 3.1W WRITE

Power Consumption (Idle):

0.092W

Max Shock Resistance:

1500G / 1.0ms

Max Vibration Resistance:

2-500Hz at 3.1G

Features:

Micron MLC NAND Flash Marvell Controller SATA 6 Gb/s interface RAID Support ATA-8 w/ TRIM Self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology (SMART) command set Random 4k READ: 50,000 IOPS Random 4k WRITE: 30,000 IOPS Built-in EDC/ECC

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