Micron RealSSD C300 SATA III SSD Review

Name: Micron RealSSD C300 SATA III SSD Review
Brand: Micron

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, February 18, 2010, 12:25 PM EDT

Looking at current solid state drive market, it's easy to draw some parallels with the early days of 3D on the PC. When 3D graphics cards first hit the scene (before the term GPU was coined), there were only a few major players, i.e. 3dfx, Tseng Labs, S3, etc. As the technology was more accepted by consumers, however, numerous other manufactures, like NVIDIA, ATI, 3DLabs, Matrox, Rendition, Number 9 and many others, wanted a piece of the pie as well and they all entered the fray with 3D processors of their own. Over time, the dust settled, the cream rose to the top, and we were left with only a select few GPU manufactures. We're sure you've all heard the stories by now.

At this point in time, the SSD market is akin to the 3D chipset boom. Whereas only a couple of companies laid the foundation when solid state drives first arrived, now we have a broad range of options to choose from. Intel, Samsung, JMicron, Indilinx, and Sandforce, among others we're sure we've missed, all make SSD controllers. Today we're going to show you yet another new SSD based on a new controller from a long-time player in PC storage, Marvell.

The Marvell 88SS9174-BJP2 controller at the heart of the Micron RealSSD C300 we're going to show you today affords the drive a feature not yet offered on any competing product--SATA III support. And the controller in combination with some of Micron's own NAND flash, culminate in a drive that offered some of the best performance we have seen from any solid state drive to date. Take a moment to check out the specs below and then strap yourself in as we show you more of the drive itself and then move on to the all-important benchmarks.

Micron RealSSD C300

Specifications and Features

As the specifications show, the Micron RealSSD C300 offers a SATA 6GB/s interface (backwards compatible to SATA 3GB of course) with a 256MB capacity, and sustained sequential read and write performance of 355MB/s and 215MB/s, respectively. Those specs alone currently put the drive in a category all by itself, but great specifications don't always translate to great real-world performance. Then again, sometimes they do...

Tags: SSD, Micron, Storage, Data, drive, solid state, Crucial

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com