New Accolades for the RealSSD C300

Our RealSSD C300 has garnered some impressive industry accolades since its introduction back in December. Recently, the RealSSD C300 was awarded the Most Innovative Solid-State Storage Technology from UBM TechInsights, beating out both Intel and Toshiba’s drives. This award is great validation for Micron’s C300 design since TechInsights’ selection process includes a rigorous product tear-down and in-depth technical analysis. (Side note, in the coming weeks we’ll be featuring a post from an analyst at TechInsights that provides more information on the benchmarks that went into review of the drives they tested. Stay tuned!)

We also continue to see great feedback from reviewers  and press—we’re excited about some recent reviews and rankings from Tom’s Hardware and PC World.

The analysts at Tom’s Hardware noted that the C300 “remains the very best choice these days.” While Melissa Perenson at PC World states that the C300 offers “top-flight overall performance, and the best write performance we’ve seen.”

So my question is, do you have a C300? If not, you should. I have one in my MacBook Pro and the difference is night and day. Visit Crucial.com to order yours.

Why SSD Testing Standards are Important

One of the great benefits of the Flash Memory Summit is the opportunity to interact with other people and companies that are serious about advancing Flash technology. One of those is Eden Kim, CEO of Calypso Systems—a company that builds SSD testers and is helping lead the push for standardized test methods (you might remember our recent post on their P300 performance testing results).

On Wednesday, I interviewed Eden about what his company does, how their testers work, and why standards are so important. He also shared his thoughts on how our P300 SSD did against the competition. Take a look:

Setting A New Benchmark for Enterprise SSDs

Today we announced our RealSSD™ P300 drive for enterprise applications. Like the C300 before it, the P300 is an incredibly fast drive built to take advantage of the bandwidth available via the SATA 6 Gb/s interface. In fact, it outstrips the bandwidth of a typical SATA 3 Gb/s connection in both reads and writes.

But comparing against a drive designed for client applications doesn’t really make sense. After all, the P300 is built with our high-performance, high-endurance, ONFI 2.1 SLC NAND and was designed with features tailored for enterprise applications (ultra-high endurance, high write-cache-disabled performance, and industry leading steady-state performance, to name a few).

To give you a good idea of where this drive comes in against other enterprise SSDs, we enlisted the help of a third-party testing firm, Calypso Systems, an experienced testing company that’s working with standards bodies to define consistent testing and reporting methodology for all SSD manufacturers (something we’re eager to see happen).

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The RealSSD P300—Dramatic Performance Improvements for Enterprise Apps

I had the chance to sit-down with Dean Klein, Vice President of Memory System Development at Micron to talk about the RealSSD™ P300 solid-state drive that was announced today. We had a good conversation about the drive, how it compares competitively, and why it’s important to be a NAND manufacturer in SSDs.

Take a look at the video and if you have any questions, let us know. I’ll bring Dean in to answer a few!

The 64GB RealSSD™ C300: Compelling Performance, Affordable Price

Lexar Media today introduced the 64GB RealSSD™ C300, extending its award-winning portfolio to offer a high performing and affordable SSD option. Like its predecessors, the 64GB RealSSD C300 natively supports SATA 6Gb/s, offering the industry’s most compelling consumer SSD solution for capacity, price and performance.

We thought our readers might want to know more about the newest entry to the RealSSD line of products, so we sat down with Ben Thiel in Micron’s SSD group to shed some light on these new drives and trends in market adoption.

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P300 SSD Preview from SNW 2010

I attended Storage Networking World this week in Orlando, Florida where I had the chance to talk with Kevin Dibelius of Micron’s SSD group and learn more about their enterprise SSD initiatives. Take a look at the video for your “sneak peek” at the RealSSD P300.

RealSSD C300 Demo: MacBook® Side-by-Side

We’ve seen a lot of interest in our C300 SSD from Apple users, so we put two identical MacBooks side by side to show the huge performance gains possible with a RealSSD C300 drive.

There are a lot of thorough performance benchmarks out there—our effort here was to create a simple video that shows what differences you might expect to see in everyday applications when you install a RealSSD C300. We cloned the factory hard drive onto a Micron C300 SSD and ran a few simple tasks.

Crucial Launches RealSSD™ C300 Drives

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.

RealSSD C300—The Mac Experience

I haven’t used a Macintosh that didn’t have an internal hard drive since I played around with a Macintosh Plus in 1986.  Now the 13″ MacBook Pro that I use here at the office is missing one … and I couldn’t be happier.

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RealSSD Wins at Storage Visions

RealSSD C300 just took home the award for best Home Consumer Electronics Storage Product at the Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas—beating out some heavy competition.

The judges noted several features of the RealSSD C300 including its SATA 6Gb/s interface, an industry-first, that doubles the bandwidth available to the SDD (when compared to the standard SATA 3Gb/s interface).

And of course, it was recognized for its unmatched speed and performance. As the benchmarking videos below demonstrate, the RealSSD C300 read speeds make it the fastest client SSD out there.