Computers & Electronics

New Crucial C300 SSD Available Monday!

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  • Feb 23rd, 2010 10:07 am
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Sr. Member
Jul 6, 2009
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New Crucial C300 SSD Available Monday!

Anybody else here looking forward to the release of the new Crucial SSD drives? If you aren't aware of it, you can google some reviews. 320-350 mb/s read speeds, 220 mb/s write speeds! It looks like it should be the best performing consumer SSD available to date. It should be $500 for the 128 gb drive at release. Not cheap by any means but still not too bad relative to some of the other SSD drives given the performance.

I found the Caviar Black too noisy, so I bought a Seagate 7200.12 to replace it and while much less noisy it died 2 weeks ago after being in use for less than a month. I tried to get a new Samsung F3 on Monday, but the clowns I bought it from at Compu2000 didn't bother to tell me until Thursday when I had to ask them if my order had shipped that even though it showed in stock and they charged my card the day I ordered, they didn't actually have any. So I ordered an OCZ Vertex at NCIX yesterday, but must have made a mistake entering my credit card info because the order didn't go through.

I took that as a sign that now being only 2 days away from the release of these new drives that I should just wait and see if they live up to the hype. I'll use the C300 for Window and programs, and a quiet WD SE16 640 gb for storage with the Caviar Black doing backup duty.

The new drive should make my PC considerably faster coming from an HDD.
23 replies
Deal Addict
Jul 11, 2006
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Facts are.....

Its is 6Gbs SATA III but is 3G Sata III compatible so you won't see these speeds from a typical system. Heads up for the future. I believe the 3g speeds are 265mb/s read and 140mb/s write.

Wait... here ya go:

128GB SATA 3Gb/s
• Sequential READ: up to 265MB/s
• Sequential WRITE: up to 140MB/s
• Random 4k READ: 50K IOPS

There are concerns though which u can see here:

_______________________________________________________________

In testing the C300 it performed very much like a faster X25-M, there was one anomaly that bothered me: maximum write latency.

Like Intel’s X25-M, whenever the C300 goes to write data it also does a bit of cleaning/reorganization of its internal data. The more cleaning the drive has to do, the longer this write process will take. Micron did its best to minimize this overhead but eventually you’ll have to pay the piper. Below you’ll see the average IOPS, average MB/s, average and max write latencies for the C300, X25-M G2 and Vertex LE during my 4KB random write test:

4KB Random Write Performance Average IOPS Average MB/s Average Latency Max Latency
Crucial RealSSD C300 36159 IOPS 141.3 MB/s 0.0827 ms 1277.9 ms
Intel X25-M G2 11773 IOPS 46.0 MB/s 0.255 ms 282.9 ms
OCZ Vertex LE 41523 IOPS 162.2 MB/s 0.072 ms 109 ms

While both Crucial and OCZ/SandForce offer incredible average write latencies, Crucial’s max latency is over a second! I haven’t actually seen max write latencies this bad since the JMicron days. But if you look at the average write latency, you’ll see that this max latency scenario basically never happens. I only worry about what happens when it does.

Crucial also warned me that despite the controller’s desire to keep performance as high as possible, if I keep bombarding it with random writes and never let up it may reach a point where it can no longer restore performance to an acceptable level. This sounds a lot like what Intel encountered with the original X25-M bug, although it’s not something I was able to bring about in normal usage thus far. Given the early nature of many of these drives, it’s going to take a lot of consistent use to figure out all of their quirks

Having said that, when you find it released somewhere post here because i think I am grabbing one..
Sr. Member
Jul 6, 2009
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I know that Sata 3 could limit its performance if you use it with a Sata 3 port, but from the reviews and tests I've read it will come with a PCI-E card/controller that will allow it to achieve its full potential. The new motherboards are coming equipped with 6G Sata this year as well. Either way, there is no reason that there should be any performance bottleneck unless you use it with a (soon to be) legacy 3G port.

Can't remember which review it was, but for one of them they performed all their benchmarks one after the other with no time for the drive to trim or whatever it is SSD's do to maintain their speed when not in use and the drive did not slow down at all. They actually made a point about how they couldn't get it to slow down, unlike the Intel drives.

I'm going to grab one Monday and I have high hopes; I'll let you know how it goes.
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Nov 27, 2005
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Richmond Hill
We're probably still a good 3-4 years away from SSD's becoming affordable for the general public. Right now it's a niche market for people willing to drop $300+ (for the good drives) on a storage device.
Deal Addict
Jul 11, 2006
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Where are u getting it Monday?

Also, the bottleneck if you will is that our systems Are Sata III 3Gb max. You are right that when the new hardware starts to come out, we can achieve Sata III 6Gbs scores. Believe me, hoping I am wrong but the scores I posted as well as the info that it is backwards compatible for the present 3gbs systems came from the horses mouth.
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Richmond Hill
flamenko wrote: Where are u getting it Monday?

Also, the bottleneck if you will is that our systems Are Sata III 3Gb max. You are right that when the new hardware starts to come out, we can achieve Sata III 6Gbs scores. Believe me, hoping I am wrong but the scores I posted as well as the info that it is backwards compatible for the present 3gbs systems came from the horses mouth.
There is no such thing as SATA III 3 Gb/s, or even SATA I, II, or III.

The only things that exist are:
SATA 1.5 Gb/s
SATA 3.0 Gb/s
SATA 6.0 Gb/s
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Mar 23, 2005
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Midland
board123 wrote: We're probably still a good 3-4 years away from SSD's becoming affordable for the general public. Right now it's a niche market for people willing to drop $300+ (for the good drives) on a storage device.
+1

Still way too expensive.
"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." - US President, Calvin Coolidge
Deal Addict
Jul 11, 2006
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I agree the average consumer doesn't want to dish out the 300 plus bucks for a simple storage medium.

For anyone using their system on a regular basis who would enjoy the performance jump however, looking at a OCZ Vertex 30Gb for under a hundred bucks to hold your OS and perhaps a couple powerful programs such as Photoshop or Office creates a completely different experience for the money.

Most never use DVD's anymore (in any case) so a sub10 dollar adapter allows you to remove the DVD and put the old hard drive in there for storage of your data, videos, piks and any non mandatory programs and whatnot.

Other alternatives are using an external drive or paying the 25 bucks or so to get a 32Gb sdhc card whic always remains tucked away in the system for storage.
Sr. Member
Jul 6, 2009
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flamenko wrote: Where are u getting it Monday?

Also, the bottleneck if you will is that our systems Are Sata III 3Gb max. You are right that when the new hardware starts to come out, we can achieve Sata III 6Gbs scores. Believe me, hoping I am wrong but the scores I posted as well as the info that it is backwards compatible for the present 3gbs systems came from the horses mouth.
I'll be ordering it wherever I can find it. It's the official release date so it should be available somewhere.

As I said in the last post, these drives will come with a Marvell PCI-E card/controller with a bandwidth of 500 mb/s, so you can bypass the older sata ports. There should be no bottleneck.
Deal Addict
Jul 11, 2006
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Ok excuse my lack of knowldege but are you saying this will be built in? I am wondering if I can get those numbers when i throw that into my 11.6" CULV Acer laptop which presently has a smaller ssd in it now.
Banned
Nov 1, 2008
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flamenko wrote: Ok excuse my lack of knowldege but are you saying this will be built in? I am wondering if I can get those numbers when i throw that into my 11.6" CULV Acer laptop which presently has a smaller ssd in it now.
It means these drives will plug into a PCI Express slot and not your typical old sata2 slot.

So unless the drive is detachable from the pci express controller, you can't use it in a laptop.
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Nov 27, 2005
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Richmond Hill
rola wrote: It means these drives will plug into a PCI Express slot and not your typical old sata2 slot.

So unless the drive is detachable from the pci express controller, you can't use it in a laptop.
No, it means it plugs into a SATA port on an external controller, not the motherboard. You can still use it on a regular SATA port, but your throughput will be capped.
Deal Addict
Oct 27, 2007
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If you use Windows 7, isn't a 30GB SSD too small?

Could you use a SSD for one OS and boot up another OS on a traditional 7200RPM drive?

I'm looking into this, that's why I'm asking. I guess it depends on how much trouble it is. I don't want to have to alternate via the BIOS, though, if I can help it.

Is dual-booting/multi-booting with Windows 7 more of a hassle than with Windows XP?
Sr. Member
Jul 6, 2009
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Hmmm...looking around today I can't find stock anywhere for this drive yet. Maybe today is not the release date after all.
Sr. Member
Jul 6, 2009
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For anyone interested, I found it on Crucial's website under PCI-E drives. I called them and it turns out that they are shipping with just the drive only, and the PCI-E card that HEXUS got with their review needs to be purchased separately. Newegg has it.
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Richmond Hill
This just occurred to me... The PCI-E card would need at least a 4X slot in order to achieve the advertised throughput. 1X is only 150 MB/s. Since very few motherboards have 4X slots, the next best thing is an 8X slot, which may or may not be vacant depending on the motherboard and how many video cards are in use.
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Oct 25, 2003
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Can you even boot off a PCI-E card/drive?
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Richmond Hill
B0000rt wrote: Can you even boot off a PCI-E card/drive?
Sure, if the card is a SATA controller then it's no different from booting from the motherboard controller.

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