Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB Review

doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.

Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives, no programs were installed, just the operating system and a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. The machine was then shut down and once started up we recorded boot times – until we reached a working desktop. We used a digital watch for this and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure. We also included a standard £70 Western Digital 1TB hard drive for comparison purposes.

We didn't think the Intel Raid 0 configuration would be beaten so quickly but it appears as if the Crucial C300 256Gb drive is the ultimate boot drive right now, shaving 2 seconds from our start up time. Granted it costs around £350 more, but if speed is your ultimate goal then this is noticeable.

Snow Leopard 10.6.4 Boot Times

Not everyone uses Windows 7, and although TRIM is only supported by this Operating system, I like to expand results a little when possible. I therefore used my Macintosh MacBook pro 17 inch, Generation 5.1 which is based around a 2.93ghz Core 2 Duo processor with 9600m graphics. There is 8GB of DDR3 ram in this machine with a full 3 Gigabit link speed over the nVidia MCP79 AHCI. I also enabled the full 64bit Kernel and Extensions – if you want to read more, check out this article.

Before we show the results it is worth pointing out that we don't expect to see gains like we did on the Windows 7 platform, because our Macintosh controller is limited to Sata 3Gbps.

Half a second is removed from our time which while not noticeable is going to be as fast as it gets on this platform. If Apple introduce a Sata 6Gbps controller then we would probably have noticed another second or so being deducted from this time.

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