Introduction

At this point do we really even need an intro for the Crucial RealSSD C300? For months Crucial has taunted us with videos, screen shots and snippets of information. At Storage Visions just days before CES we met with Crucial and they were waving a drive around; our eyes were like a dog fixated on its master swinging around a fresh piece of bacon. You can look, you can touch, you can take pictures but you can't plug it in. Damn it man, stop with the cruelty!

Today Crucial finally let a RealSSD C300 out of their grasp and somehow we managed to have it land on our doorstep. The RealSSD C300 uses Marvell's new SATA 6Gbps solid state drive controller, the first of its kind. Crucial took Marvell's hardware and let Crucial engineers produce the firmware for the drive.

We have already gone over the benefits and potential of SATA 6Gbps in other articles so there is little need to give a full breakdown. The short story is that SATA 6G has twice the headroom as SATA 3G has. There is more to the story, but for the most part 2x the potential covers it for today. It should be noted that in our testing the fastest SATA II SSDs have been able to reach right around 250 to 260 MB/s in our tests.

When it comes to the availability of SATA 6G products, you are in luck. GIGABYTE and ASUS have already released several P55 boards with SATA 6G and GIGABYTE also has an X58 motherboard with the latest technology already. SATA 6G connectivity is currently only available as an add-on chip from Marvell for the motherboard market. LSI and Intel both have high end SATA / SAS RAID controllers that support both SATA 6G and SAS 6G products. Several other companies like Highpoint and Promise have add-in boards that bring SATA 6G connectivity to current motherboards and are reasonably priced.

Enough with the chit chat, let's get to what you want to really see.