Review: Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB - the best solid-state drive yet?

Final thoughts and rating

Not all solid-state drives (SSDs) are created equal. Manufacturers tend to promote sequential reading and writing speeds - much like MHz for CPUs - and market a drive's abilities based around that.

If recommendations were handed out for single-drive sequential throughput, Crucial's RealSSD C300 would be a shoo-in for an award. Based around a Marvell controller that interfaces with some super-fast NAND from Micron, the drive can hit in excess of 350MB/s reading and 200MB/s writing - fast enough for it to need a SATA 6Gb/s connection to a motherboard.

The good news for Crucial is that the RealSSD C300 is more than a sequential-speed show pony, evinced by the commendable benchmark scores in Iometer tests that are characterised by small-file transfers on mostly-random access patterns.

With no obvious performance weaknesses and a £-to-GB metric of just over two, the RealSSD C300 makes a solid case as the main storage drive in a very high-end PC or workstation machine. £550 is a lot of money for a single 256GB SSD, sure, but the C300 is some drive.

Bottom line: going to the top of the SSD class with some drool-worthy performance, the Crucial RealSSD C300 does enough to garner a HEXUS performance gong as storage for the ultimate PC. The best SSD going? We'll only know that once a SandForce-powered drive has been through the wringer. Stay tuned for an interesting head-to-head.

The good

Stratospheric sequential read speed
Solid performance in all tests
On balance, the fastest SSD we've ever tested

The not so good

£550 for a 256GB SSD is painful

HEXUS Rating

Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB

HEXUS Awards

Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB

HEXUS Where2Buy

The 256GB drive (CTFDDAC256MAG-1G1) can be purchased for £547 from Crucial UK. The 128GB model (CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1) is available for £351. Both prices include VAT and delivery.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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Thank you - glad someone had some coffee this morning - TS. :)

Interesting review, I look forward to reading the next :)

That's the first drive to really go head to head with an intel .. and come out even.

no vertex LE ? this is just above or below the c300 in most benchies

j1979
no vertex LE ? this is just above or below the c300 in most benchies

Hi, thanks for the comment. :)

The OCZ Vertex LE is a SandForce-based drive. The next SSD on the review schedule is the Corsair F100, which is also powered by a SandForce controller, and we'll have the review up next week.

I would love to have seen some benches of the more affordable 128GB version too! Aside from the more limited write speed, I wonder if the 128GB's performance would be lower in the Iometer workstation tests. If everything was equal apart from write speed, I would be tempted to use that as an OS+Programs+Games drive…

I wish Intel's next gen wasn't so far away - I have a feeling they might be slightly cheaper :(