Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB Review

1. Introduction2. The Crucial RealSSD 256GB3. Testing Methodology4. Atto Disk Benchmark5. AS SSD Benchmark6. SiSoft Sandra Professional7. HD Tach8. Real World Testing9. IOMeter10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

KitGuru loves SSD's – and with small affordable units hitting the market such as the excellent Intel X25-V 40GB and the upcoming Corsair 40GB Force there has never been a better time to take the plunge.

Many of the new performance units feature the SandForce controller however the model are looking at today from Crucial features a Marvell 88SS9174 BJP2 controller – thanks to an exclusive partnership between the companies.

The Sandforce controller has been a huge success due to the smart compression algorithms it uses to create stunning high performance levels … however Crucial and Marvell have opted to take a more traditional approach. The Marvell controller is designed around a central drive controller chip which is linked to Micron DRAM which resides on the rear of the PCB. This means there is no performance penalty when switching between compressed or uncompressed data.

The Crucial REALSSD is available in 128GB and 256GB configurations and we are reviewing the larger model today.

Crucial Real SSD C300	128GB	256GB
Read Speed (max)	355MB/s	355MB/s
Write Speed (max)	140MB/s	215MB/s
Controller	Marvell	Marvell
Buffer Chip	Micron	Micron
Buffer size	256MB	256MB
Trim Support	Yes	Yes
Retail Price	£335	£550

The Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB arrives in a rather understated, yet attractive box which details the size on the front …

… and the specifications on the back. Yes, it supports Trim, which is always great to see.

The package contains a few information leaflets, a CD with the EZ Gig II Cloning software and a handy Sata to USB 2.0 converter cable.

The Crucial drive is designed in the same sunset coloured scheme as the box packaging. The rear has a serial number and other information on the drive.

The drive chassis is opened by removing four screws on the top side, please be aware if you do this at home you will void your warranty, that is why KitGuru is here … we laugh in the face of warranties.

Above we can see both sides of the Crucial RealSSD PCB. The drive controller is significantly larger than other controllers we have looked at, because it comprises several ARM9 processors which operate in parallel for maximum efficiency. There is also a 128GB DRAM cache on the PCB underbelly.

The Marvell controller is an extremely fast design and as such is going to need a SATA 6Gbps connection to hit its maximum performance, which is a whopping 355MB/s read speed. If you use this drive via a standard 3Gbps port then it is going to be ‘limited' to around 285MB/s. Crucial (Micron) are one of the leading suppliers of memory throughout the world and they are using 16 Micron 16GB modules – 34nm MLC NAND. The NAND is also Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) 2.1 certified which is one of the first ever used in a mainstream consumer model and theorectically allows the individual modules to achieve read speeds of 166 MB/s.

The more observant among you will have noticed already that we noted write speeds of around 215MB/s, this is significantly slower than the Sandforce unit which can reach a peak of around 270MB/s. That said, this unit isnt compressing data so it is a remarkable figure to be quoting, many SSD's with a similar design ethic are limited to around 180-190MB/s.

It is worth pointing out before we go any further in the review that the 128GB drive offers a much slower write speed, peaking at around 140MB/s – this is because writing to NAND is strictly dependent on density.

After formatting, there is 238.47GB available.

For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4 which you can get yourself over here. We try to use free programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

We tested the Intel drives in both single mode and in Raid 0. There is a good chance that people buying one of these drives might in future add another for an inexpensive performance boost. We also like to test Raid 0 when we get a chance!

As we mentioned earlier in the article it is important to ensure that your motherboard is capable of delivering full SATA 6Gbps or this drive is going to be limited to slower speeds. Rather than swapping out the long term SSD testing rig we are using a Highpoint RocketRAID 620 SATA controller that provides both SATA 6Gbps (rev 3.0) transfer speeds as well as Raid 0, 1,5, 10, JBOD support. We also have found that many onboard Sata 6Gbps ports are not delivering optimium performance levels.

Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB

Comparison Drives:
OCZ Vertex 2 100GB
Buffalo 128GB Microstation
Intel X25-V 40GB (+Raid 0)
Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 128GB SSD
OCZ Vertex 128GB
Intel X-25M 160GB SSD
Corsair P128 SSD

CPU: Intel Core i7 875k
Cooler: Noctua NH 14D
Motherboard: Intel DP55WG
Hard Drive: Western Digital 1TB
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 1600mhz (4gb)
Sata Interface: Highpoint RocketRAID 620 SATA Controller
PSU: Enermax 1250w Revolution
Graphics: Zotac GTX465
Chassis: Silverstone Raven 2
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Monitor: LaCie 730 30 inch LED screen

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration. Median averages were extrapolated from the results – this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

The Crucial drive delivers a staggering result in the read test, even managing to outperform the Intel 40GB drives configured to Raid 0. Write speeds are also excellent with only the Sandforce Vertex 2 outperforming the 256GB RealSSD.

The AS SSD benchmark is another free utility which was created specifically with SSD’s in mind. It delivers a plethora of tests across sequential read and write and also places random read and write loads across a specific area of the drive. This is a good tool to use in conjunction with Windows 7 as it mirrors a very real world set of conditions.

The Crucial C300 256GB drive (347MB/s)  just falls slightly short of the 40GB Intel drives in Raid 0 (356MB/s), but manages to scream ahead in the write test outperforming the Corsair and Kingston drives by well over 30 MB/s.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

We think these Sandra read and write tests speak volumes about the efficiency of this controller, it is not only outperforming the Intel Raid 0 system, but the write speeds are the highest we have recorded with this software suite. Stunning results for Crucial and Marvell.

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

Once again we can see the massive bandwidth from the Marvell controller which is considerably outperforming the Intel Raid 0 configuration by around 30 MB/s.

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.

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and announced at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) on February 17, 1998 – since then it got wide spread within the industry. Meanwhile Intel has discontinued work on Iometer and it was given to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). The project is now driven by an international group of individuals who are continuously improving, porting and extending the product.

These are outstanding results for the Crucial drive as it leads the way in our tested 4k read and write benchmarks.

The SSD market is extremely competitive right now and extremely confusing for people looking to purchase a new drive. Should you get a C300 256GB? At the end of the day it is all going to boil down to how much money you have (or want) to spend.

If you are looking for a performance SSD configuration without spending over £200 then we still believe that the Intel X-25 40GB drives in Raid 0 is the most viable and cost effective purchase. With the new Corsair 40GB Force drive due out shortly this is going to spice things up even more. KitGuru will have a full indepth analysis of this drive shortly.

There are some instances when 80GB will not be enough, even for a boot drive and this when the larger, more expensive drives come into play. The Crucial drive we reviewed today is without a doubt the fastest SSD we have tested in our labs to date. It is also the only single drive to outperform the Intel Raid 0 configuration in benchmarks such as ATTO – this is no mean feat and showcases the incredible capabilities of the Marvell 88SS9174 BJP2 controller. We strongly feel this controller is leading the way now and has stolen the performance crown from the SandForce units.

As would be expected, the blazing performance and large storage capacity comes with a hefty price premium, and a rather wallet sapping one at that. In the UK right now the drive costs around £550 inc vat directly from Crucial. Is it worth it? We think so, but if you are working with limited funds then this is going to be way out of your shortlist price point but you hardly need me to tell you that.

Another important point to make is that KitGuru has found that many of the 6Gbps Sata connectors on modern motherboards are not allowing the maximum throughput and we would strongly recommend that you seriously contemplate buying a Highpoint RocketRAID 620 SATA controller from an online retailer, it really is in a class of its own right now. Unfortunately this is going to add another £40 to the overall cost.

KitGuru says: Performance enthusiasts with deeper pockets will already be online ordering a few of these for a Raid 0 configuration. Yes, we envy you. If you're feeling the need for C300 speed, YOYOTech was holding stock here when KitGuru went to press.

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