Micron RealSSD C300 SATA III SSD Review
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. The SSDs were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO benchmark tests. And all drives were secure erased prior to the start of the tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Hard Drives -
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Hardware Used: Intel Core i7 965 Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme (X58 Express Chipset) GeForce GTX 280 6144MB Corsair DDR3-1333 CAS 7 Integrated on board Micron C300 256GB OCZ Vertex Turbo Series 120GB Intel X25-M Gen2 160GB |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate Intel 9.1.1.1025 w/ Matrix Storage DirectX 11 NVIDIA ForceWare v196.34 Benchmarks Used: HD Tach v3.0.1.0 ATTO v2.41 CrystalDiskMark v3 PCMark Vantage SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP4 |
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In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns with IOMeter; one with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and one with IOMeter's default access pattern of 2K transfers, 67% reads and 100% random access.
The Micron RealSSD C300 performed relatively well in our IOMeter testing, but with the access patters we used Intel's X25-M still comes out on top by a large margin. Interestingly, connecting the C300 to a SATA III controller didn't have much impact on performance here--that's not the case in some of our other tests, as you'll see.
