First truly great SSD gets reviewed - Crucial Realssd c300

Their review lists the price at $499 for the 128GB and $799 for the 256GB, both $100.00 more each than what is listed on the front page of [H]. Which is correct?
 
i can't find where they answer the only question that matters
is it better than an intel g2 as an OS/programs disk?
 
Cyclone said:
i can't find where they answer the only question that matters
is it better than an intel g2 as an OS/programs disk?
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Well, it does show better numbers in random read/write so I would guess that yeah, it is. However, it requires SATA6 which will require mobo/controller upgrade for 99% of us, and the price as quoted in the article is much higher than for the Intel drives.
 
[LYL]Homer;1035276782 said:
Tweaktown has not tested any Intel SSD? wtf
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I was wondering the same thing, all those SSD's tested and not a single Intel drive :confused:
 
TehQuick said:
Well, it does show better numbers in random read/write so I would guess that yeah, it is. However, it requires SATA6 which will require mobo/controller upgrade for 99% of us, and the price as quoted in the article is much higher than for the Intel drives.
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I'm pretty sure nothing REQUIRES sata 6gb/s. If it has faster random reads/writes than an Intel drive, it'll still be faster when running on a sata 3gb/s interface, because the Intel drive was not saturating sata 3gb/s in random performance.
 
TehQuick said:
Well, it does show better numbers in random read/write so I would guess that yeah, it is. However, it requires SATA6 which will require mobo/controller upgrade for 99% of us, and the price as quoted in the article is much higher than for the Intel drives.
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The drive will work on a SATA2 (3G) controller. It will just perform better on a SATA3 (6G).

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=3712

2_SV_Random-Reads.jpg
 
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TheSpoon said:
I'm pretty sure nothing REQUIRES sata 6gb/s. If it has faster random reads/writes than an Intel drive, it'll still be faster when running on a sata 3gb/s interface, because the Intel drive was not saturating sata 3gb/s in random performance.
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panhead said:
The drive will work on a SATA2 (3G) controller. It will just perform better on a SATA3 (6G).
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I didn't phrase it correctly. I'm pretty sure for this new drive to beat intel it needs Sata6 controller, otherwise it's gonna be pretty much the same if not a little slower because Intel already maxes out Sata3 ;)
 
TehQuick said:
I didn't phrase it correctly. I'm pretty sure for this new drive to beat intel it needs Sata6 controller, otherwise it's gonna be pretty much the same if not a little slower because Intel already maxes out Sata3 ;)
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The sequential read speed of the X25-M and the C300 will be about the same with a SATA2 connection for both, since it approaches the 300 MB/s cap.

But the 4K random write IOPS for the C300 are much higher than for the X25-M, even with SATA2.

http://www.micronblogs.com/2009/12/you-asked-for-it-realssd-c300-random-iops/
 
I knew it! :(

It never fails.
I just paid top dollar for an Intel 160GB.
Prices will fall by more than 50% before the year ends... hum... okay, that's a good thing. :D

I am holding off any other system upgrade until the end of the year in order to get all the new standards at once.

I also suspect Intel's new 256GB drive to be as fast or faster than the C300.
Let's all remember that throughput increases with storage capacity.
 
spectrumbx said:
I knew it! :(

It never fails.
I just paid top dollar for an Intel 160GB.
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I'm about to pull the trigger on one as well.

At this point, even with these new drives coming out, I'm still more confident in the Intel drives at this point for maintaining performance and overall stability. I just fear that with some of these new controllers on the new drives there will be issues that won't appear until the drives are well into use, whereas the Intel drives at this point are a known quantity.

I'm sure by the end of the year that will change when other drives are in their 2nd and 3rd generations, but for now, I'll stick with the Intel ones. Lord knows they are plenty fast enough already.
 
spectrumbx said:
I knew it! :(

It never fails.
I just paid top dollar for an Intel 160GB.
Prices will fall by more than 50% before the year ends... hum... okay, that's a good thing. :D

I am holding off any other system upgrade until the end of the year in order to get all the new standards at once.

I also suspect Intel's new 256GB drive to be as fast or faster than the C300.
Let's all remember that throughput increases with storage capacity.
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Intel's drives don't sport the biggest benchmarking numbers, but them seem to do the best in real world applications where it counts the most. I think the Intel drive still looks like a pretty good choice.
 
Actually Intel currently sports the best benchmarking numbers. Their IOPS alone dwarfs all other drives on the market. But it doesn't translate as much into real world performance in comparison.
 
Waiting patiently for anand's review ...

Also, Intel's next SSD should coincide with their next chipset revision that supports sata 6g and usb 3.
 
Ravynmagi said:
Intel's drives don't sport the biggest benchmarking numbers, but them seem to do the best in real world applications where it counts the most. I think the Intel drive still looks like a pretty good choice.
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The only numbers that Intel is better in the access time. Micron gets close on the read access and is almost 10x longer in writes. In everything else you see 26-40% increase (see my blog where I'm compiling the differences between a Vertex, G2 and C300). From a consumer perspective Anandtech did a couple of benchmarks between and Intel G2 drive and an Indilinx based Vertex. What was interesting is that the higher sequential read/write speeds actually benefited the Vertex (I'm guessing it's the higher weighting of program and OS starts). So the C300 should blow Intel out of the water except for the fact that Micron will be pitting their 128GB drive against Intel's 160GB. Can't wait to see and Anandtech update on this.
 
panhead said:
Be careful what SATA controller you use with SSDs. Benchmarkreviews has some poor performance with Marell's SE91XX 6Gb/s controllers :(

http://www.hardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1492240
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This ^^^^^^^

&

nsx241 said:
Waiting patiently for anand's review ...

Also, Intel's next SSD should coincide with their next chipset revision that supports sata 6g and usb 3.
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After finally switching to the blue team intel chipsets are great and I will wait for it.

Which in the end doesn't really matter cause all my external Drives are ESATA and don't really care for USB 3.0 currently but meh.
 
nsx241 said:
Waiting patiently for anand's review ...

Also, Intel's next SSD should coincide with their next chipset revision that supports sata 6g and usb 3.
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Anand previewed this drive about a month ago and compared it directly to Intel's X25-M as well as an Indillix drive IIRC... Looks nice, but Micron's gonna be drawing from the same pool of flash memory that Intel is... Meaning the drives will probably carry a nice premium for quite a few months, just like Intel's drives have. I doubt prices (of any drive) are gonna plummet by 50% just because this drive is released, we won't see that until next year (2011) when 25nm drives start to come out.

That being said, I would never pay $400+ for a SSD... :eek: But I didn't pay that much for any one part in my current system, hell I didn't even pay $300 for any one part in it. 80-120GB drives for $250-300 are a nice sweet spot imo... Even if technically speaking you're getting more GB for your dollar w/the 160GB X25-M drives (if you can find 'em at a reasonable price, good luck on that).
 
Impulse said:
Anand previewed this drive about a month ago and compared it directly to Intel's X25-M as well as an Indillix drive IIRC...
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The data Anand had on the C300 was provided by Micron -- Anand did not get to run any tests on a C300 yet (although I expect he has one in his hands now).

You might be thinking of the Vertex 2 Pro with the Sandforce controller, that Anand did run some tests on. I'm looking forward to a review from Anand comparing the C300, a Sandforce SSD, and the X25-M G2.
 
Ohh, my bad, yeah... I had the SandForce-based drive in mind. He just had a shorter article previewing the Micron drive but no actual tests, you're right. In any case, if I was gonna wait I'd probably wait 'till they're both out to see how pricing really pans out... I'd be pleasantly surprised if either (or both) drives actually have an impact on the pricing of current/smaller SSD, if anything I guess it might at 'least subside the high demand for some of the Intel drives so we might actually see 'em at MSRP. :p
 
Impulse said:
Anand previewed this drive about a month ago and compared it directly to Intel's X25-M as well as an Indillix drive IIRC... Looks nice, but Micron's gonna be drawing from the same pool of flash memory that Intel is... Meaning the drives will probably carry a nice premium for quite a few months, just like Intel's drives have. I doubt prices (of any drive) are gonna plummet by 50% just because this drive is released, we won't see that until next year (2011) when 25nm drives start to come out.

That being said, I would never pay $400+ for a SSD... :eek: But I didn't pay that much for any one part in my current system, hell I didn't even pay $300 for any one part in it. 80-120GB drives for $250-300 are a nice sweet spot imo... Even if technically speaking you're getting more GB for your dollar w/the 160GB X25-M drives (if you can find 'em at a reasonable price, good luck on that).
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I paid $489 Canadian for my 160GB drive while they were all going for $550 and up so can't complain ;)
 
I paid $250 for my 80GB X25-M, think I paid like $8 on top of that to have it shipped from CA to NY... I started to question whether I should've waited it out but after weeks, and then months, of the prices not falling at all I don't feel any remorse anymore. :p

Same reason why I jumped on the 40GB X25-V once I saw it had full TRIM support (the only thing that kept me from buying the Kingston drive)... I hadn't seen a discount on the 30GB Indillix drives in a while when I got it, and the night I did I saw them at $95 AR at Newegg... I was tempted to cancel my $120 order for the X25-V but in the end for a $20 difference I decided to go w/the extra 10GB rather than the better sequential writes.

Haven't really put it thru it's paces yet tho... I slipped it on the netbook but I don't think I've done much besides web browsing on it since I did so, I'll probably take a couple of hours next week to compare it to the HDD that was previously on it and see how much faster it's booting, hibernating, if it had any impact on battery life (I've been using it plugged in, on the couch), etc. I haven't seen very many tests regarding SSD and battery life on laptops.
 
There won't be much of a price drop until there is a new manufacturing process change, which is slated for Q4 2010.

So, this time next year, we will have some serious offerings in SSD.
 
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