Now available through crucial.com—the RealSSD C300 client drive that everyone’s talking about. Crucial is offering the 2.5” drive in 128GB and 256GB densities (priced at $499.99 and $799.99, respectively).
Visit crucial.com for more information.
We created quite a buzz when we announced the C300 RealSSD drive last month—the world’s fastest client SSD. Following the announcement, many of you were eager to know: Where can I buy it? How soon will they be shipping?
Today, we have answers to those questions.
I’m happy to announce that Lexar Media will be carrying the C300 at www.crucial.com. Many of you already know Crucial as a reliable retailer of top-quality performance memory upgrades, so the RealSSD drive is a perfect addition to their high-caliber line of products. The details:
Where: www.crucial.com
Models: 2.5”, 128GB and 256GB
Availability: February
If you missed our benchmark videos, scroll through the blog history to see what all the buzz was about. Or just wait a few weeks for the first set of independent reviews—we’re confident that the C300 RealSSD drive will solidly establish itself as the SSD all others are compared to.
We received a couple requests to show the AS benchmark results for the new drive. So we asked Todd to provide a couple screen shots of the results–and here they are.
Of course, our immediate goal is to get these in the hands of independent reviewers. You should see third-party tests coming out in the next month or so as we ramp to production and get drives sent out. Stay tuned–we’ll call out results both here and through our @RealSSD Twitter feed.
AS SSD Benchmark: 3G Empty
AS SSD Benchmark: 6G Empty
A lot of people are excited about the C300 demos we posted last week, and a number of you asked to see the random read/write IOPs numbers for the new drives. So I’ve asked one of our Apps guys, Todd, to shoot a video of the C300 running through the Iometer test. These are 4K transfers on 100% random read/write tests with a queue depth of 32.
We’re using the same Intel Core2Duo system, equipped with our 256GB RealSSD C300 drive and a 6 Gb/s SATA host bus adapter. We also test it at SATA 3 Gb/s to show how it will perform in those systems. I think you’re going to like the results.
By now you’ve seen our SSD vs SSD benchmarks, but to show you how that speed translates to the real world, we pitted our 256GB C300 SSD against a standard issue 7200rpm HDD in identical systems. We then tackled a handful of everyday tasks—boot up, file copy, and opening large files in Adobe® Photoshop®.
System Details
MoBo: Intel® X48 chipset based
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E8500
Memory: Micron® 2GB DDR3 1066 (PC3-8500)
OS: Windows® 7 Pro 64-b
Our new RealSSD C300 outperforms every client SSD currently available on the market. To prove it, we ran a few standard benchmarking tools (PCMark Vantage’s disk suite and the classic disk benchmark ATTO) on identical systems. The only difference: a 256GB Micron RealSSD C300 in one system and the leading competitor’s 160GB SSD in the other.
System Details
MoBo: Intel® X48 chipset based
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E8500
Memory: Micron® 2GB DDR3 1066 (PC3-8500)
Drive Interface: SATA 6Gb/s (via Marvel HBA)
We’re pretty passionate around here about engineering SSDs that get the highest performance possible. Part of that engineering effort is within the devices themselves—ensuring that our SSDs live up to the potential that our NAND flash offers. That said, there are many variables outside of the SSD that impact performance—like the operating system or hardware interface. After all, many of today’s SSDs are being asked to live in a world designed for HDDs.
The SSD group at Micron has done extensive research into the behavior of Windows XP and Windows Vista under different conditions. To gather data, the SATA interface was analyzed and data captured while installing, booting, shutting down, and running Office productivity applications on both operating systems.
So Micron is a co-chair on the task group within JEDEC that’s working to better define SSD standards. We work with others in the industry to define the future standards that will apply to SSD products with the goal of defining a shared language for building, testing, and measuring solid state storage products. So because we’re so heavily involved in driving these new standards, I always enjoy hearing new claims of SSD performance and endurance. Sometimes I’m impressed … oftentimes it’s just good to see others catch-up…
In order to help folks better understand some of the claims out there, I thought I’d provide a quick overview on managing NAND on an SSD as well as some background on wear-leveling concepts.
