The C300 RealSSD™ Drive—Available Soon at Crucial.com

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.

AS Benchmarks for RealSSD C300

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

You asked for it: RealSSD C300 random IOPs

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.

RealSSD C300 goes head-to-head with a hard drive in everyday tasks

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

Benchmarking the World’s Fastest Client SSD

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)

Announcing the new RealSSD C300

To explain why today’s announcement of Micron’s new RealSSD C300 is a game-changer for speed and storage in notebook and desktop PCs, I asked our SSD expert, Dean Klein, to share some of the thinking that went into the product and what you’ll experience the first time you boot up a computer with a RealSSD C300 inside.

Windows 7: One Small Step for SSDs, a Giant Step for NAND-kind

Microsoft’s new Windows 7 is the first operating system to detect the presence of a solid state drive (SSD) in a system and then optimize the OS to boost performance and endurance of the drive’s NAND flash memory blocks.

Call it another sign the era of mechanical hard drive domination is ending. And another small step toward flash freedom.

“This is the first step, and as good as Windows 7 is for SSDs, it’s still a baby step with so much more potential ahead,” Dean Klein, Micron’s SSD guru and vice president of memory system development told me in an interview.

I wanted to talk to Dean for the SSD perspective on Windows 7 after last week’s conversation with Micron’s Matthias Buchner on what impact Windows 7 will have on DRAM.

Dean was kind enough to break away from his busy schedule developing Micron’s next generation RealSSD™ products to wax evangelical about the breakthrough that Windows 7 represents in designing operating systems that optimize SSD technology, rather than accommodate the shortcomings of the mechanical hard drive.

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Standards, Questions, and the Big Dialogue: Talking is Good for the Whole Industry

I’m headed to Chicago today to attend the Storage Networking Industry Association’s Technical Symposium. Now, I know what you’re thinking “Gee, Chicago in May sounds lovely, count me in!” but really; as much as I like Chicago, I’m also really looking forward to this conference (and I don’t just say that because my SNIA colleagues might be reading this post).

First up–who the heck is SNIA?  Usual blogger shortcut here–a quote from their website:

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Overprovisioning: Give a little, get a lot.

Suppose I told you that the local car dealership was selling a car that offered double the gas mileage of standard models (or double the top speed for you daredevils).  You’d probably say something like “Sure, but what is it going to cost me?”  Suppose I told you that the models were identical, but the performance version had just one less seat.  In order to double the gas mileage or top speed, all you had to do was give up a single seat.  Would you buy it?

If you used you car as a vanpool, and if you were loaded to the gills already, probably not.  But what if I also told you that this rule applied to their larger vehicles too—you could get a massive 18-passenger maxi-van with double the typical gas mileage if you  were willing to order one with 13 seats instead.  Suppose I also told you that this trick worked on every car they made.

What about now?  Would you do it? For those of you that think I’ve lost it there is a computer analogy coming (you knew there would be, right?). Suppose I told you that you could  as much as double the performance of your solid state drive (SSD) if you gave up 25% of the capacity.  Would you do it?  Suppose I also told you that the drive will last longer as a bonus.  How about now?

You can do all this. How? Overprovisioning.

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History of Digital Storage. Part 7: NAND in SSDs

The Marriage of NAND Flash and SSDs

• A History of Digital Storage
  1. Tape Drives
  2. Magnetic Drum Memory
  3. The Birth of the Hard Drive
  4. The 5.25-inch Hard Drive
  5. Limitations of the HDD
  6. The RAM SSD & NAND
  7. NAND in SSDs

NAND technology paved the way for a new breed of SSD that is able to emulate HDDs in most enterprise or consumer applications. These SSDs are far less expensive than DRAM-based SSDs and still offer several advantages over HDDs—particularly in terms of performance and reliability.

Because NAND-based SSDs are a solid state technology, they have no moving parts and offer much better performance than HDDs. When a command is issued to an HDD, the drive must seek with its actuator, spin its platter, and then transfer the data back to the host. But SSDs have no moving parts (requiring only the time it takes to process the command), and they have random access times as quick as 20µs [52].

HDD External Storage I/O Timing

The improved performance of new SSDs equates to 10,000 IOPS compared to less than 450 IOPS for the fastest HDDs [53]. When used in enterprise applications like Internet banking, SSDs might significantly boost information access.

With no moving parts to wear out or break, an SSD will

SSD External Storage I/O Timing

outlast almost any HDD, which typically has only a three- to five-year life expectancy if it is not bumped, banged, or dropped. By comparison, a modern SSD might last twice that long and do so without the sensitivities to mechanical shock and while consuming only a fraction of the power.

RAIDs, Connections, and the Next Step for SSDs

SSDs can go anywhere an HDD can, so for enterprise and consumer applications alike, SSDs are replacing HDDs—a trend that is sure to continue for the next decade or more. But using an SSD as a drop-in replacement for an HDD is not necessarily using SSDs to their fullest potential. RAID controllers, HDD interfaces, and storage subsystems have been optimized for the characteristics of rotating magnetic media and may be a bottleneck for solid state storage.

Due to the flexibility of NAND solid state storage, SSDs will once again change the picture of storage in computers. NAND-based storage will become more integrated into the computer and will enable new generations of applications. Productivity gains will be measurable and the power savings, dramatic.

Conclusion

Digital storage has come a long way since 1956, with the most recent innovation being SSDs. And now that SSDs are gaining new ground with the advancements made possible by NAND Flash technology, they represent the next evolutionary step for storage applications.

Notes:

[52] Wong, page 15.
[53] Justin Sykes, “SSDs to Boost Data Center Performance,” Micron Technology, Inc. Boise, Idaho, (July 30, 2008): page 3.