The last two months have seen a few more SSD's crossing our paths.   One made the grade and sadly the others did not.   To date Intel's Extreme still maintains the roost and our choice as the top end of choice within workstations.  Whilst newer SSD's have been floating about for some time we have as of yet to meet one that has the agility and performance of the Intel® X25-M Extreme.   Until now.

Crucial have been around now for a good period being one of the few that have constantly rising to the challenge to make better, faster and more affordable SSD's to the community.   When the rumour broke with the announcement of the near impossible claims of reads of up to 350MB/s and writes of up to 215MB/s it was not long before the RealSSD C300 arrived and we put it through its paces. 

SSD's still bring with them many stigma's and questions to those that are unsure of moving from standard rotational media.   As many still believe that the WD VelociRaptor still gives a major bang for buck in many areas, especially the new 600GB 6GB/s variant.  Cost/GB of course still being the primary objective that the SSD makers still have to overcome - but now they are turning this around slowly.     There are other old wives tales about, though take some with a bucket of salt others, ask the question and possibly save you hundreds of bucks.

Crucial's Marketing has fired over a few nice bits about their two drives, the tools provided and a little insight to the newcomer on the block who has not looked at this type of drives at all.

Moving onwards we look at the Public Relations draft to the product

The need for speed
If you're looking for unhindered speed, Crucial's RealSSD™ C300 is here! The new 2.5-inch Crucial RealSSD C300 drive offers mobile and desktop users scorching-fast read speeds of up to 355MB/s. And because it has no moving parts, you will also enjoy a quieter, cooler, and more durable storage solution — and a better alternative to a traditional notebook hard drive.

Improved data transfers
Designed with high-speed synchronous MLC NAND, advanced controller technology, optimized NAND management, and the new SATA 6GB/s interface, these drives dramatically improve data transfers for bandwidth-demanding applications like audio and video.

Push your performance
The improvement in boot time and application load times push performance to new levels at the desktop too. You will experience improvement across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

Memory Experts
The Crucial brand of memory has long been synonymous with reliability and high-performance. Our expertise in NAND process technology enables us to optimize the performance and durability of Crucial solid-state drives.

Guaranteed compatible
Crucial RealSSD C300 series employ a standard hard drive interface and dimensions, so it is an easy storage upgrade for most notebooks.

With the PR sector complete we move onwards to a few pictures of the item in the flesh

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - C300 in the Flesh
Page 3 - System Set-Up and Software Used
Page 4 - Crystal Mark 3 Drive Benchmark, ATTO Disk Benchmark and HD TACH 3.0.4.0
Page 5 - Everest Ultimate (Latest Build)
Page 6 - Sandra 2010
Page 7 - PCMark 2005 Advanced Hard Disc Test
Page 8 - Cinebench 10 64-Bit, Cinebench 11.5 64-bit (New) and POVRAY Version 3.7 beta 3.7a
Page 9 - SPECviewperf® 10.0 64-bit, SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™ and Bentley MicroStation Benchmark
Page 10 - Conclusions