Crucial RealSSD C300 128 GB

If there was one SSD that was sorely missing from our internal drive reviews it's got to be this one. The RealSSD C300 from Crucial is a worthy competitor for the Intel X25-M, OCZ Vertex 2 and Mach Xtreme Technology MX-DS. That's why we're pleased to announce we'll be reviewing the 128 GB version, although it's also available with capacities of 64 GB and 256 GB.

One interesting thing about this SSD is that it uses the Marvell 88SS9174 controller instead of the SandForce SF-1222 that dominates the SSD market. What's even more interesting is that this controller means the C300 integrates a 6 Gbps SATA-3 interface, at a time when all current competitors (at the time of writing) stick to 3 Gbps SATA-2 connections. It looks like we may finally have found an SSD capable of getting the very best out of the Marvell SATA-3 controller on our motherboard!

The rest of the spec is all pretty standard stuff, with Micron MLC memory chips and a practical 2.5-inch format that can be used in either laptop or desktop computers.

The first results from the CrystalDiskMark test are unequivocal: we're definitely in the presence of a SATA-3 drive. It's the first SSD to smash its way through 300 MBps, in spite of the restrictions imposed by our test procedure, which uses the first 4 GB of the drive.
 

It literally blows the Intel X25-M's current record for sequential read speeds out of the water, blasting its way through 230 MBps to reach 316 MBps! Plus, the other performances observed are good enough to rival the very best drives we've reviewed to date.
As usual, we then used the AS-SSD test to double-check the results obtained above.
 

The results are just as good, apart from the random write speed of smaller files, which drops all the way down to 38 MBps with an NCQ of 64 threads. Another disappointment was the rather unimpressive access times, particularly in our random write tests.
 

 
Thankfully, slowness in the latter mode is not usually a problem in practice, as we'll see below.

First of all, the traditional PCMark Vantage test gave a reading close to 32000 on our test computer. That's in line with the excellent Intel X25-M.
 

Among the SSDs that we've tested to date, only the OCZ Vertex 2 did better, with a score of almost 36000.

However, in our strictly practical tests, the results are a little more mixed.
 

These results are mostly equivalent to those obtained by the best SSDs we've tested so far, and our second benchmark—loading the game Arma II—is actually a little faster. The results for installing the demo of Crysis and Windows Office Pro 2007 are, however, a little more disappointing. This slight slowness can be explained quite simply by a write mode access time that's slower than in the best SSDs out there. Remember that during these tests, the installation files are actually on the SSD itself, and so read and write access to the drive is highly frequent and alternates repeatedly. The scores are by no means disastrous though, as the C300 is only 10% and 20% slower respectively in these two tests than the best SSDs.