Introduction

If you missed our original review of the Crucial RealSSD C300, now is a good time to spend a few minutes reading the entertaining back story. Crucial didn't try to hide the C300 from the public; they even started publishing a blog showing benchmark results. Most of the test results they displayed were the kind of thing that us storage nerds like to test with, but they don't give a good indication of how a drive will perform in real world conditions. Because of this we really wanted to get a drive for testing and at Storage Visions one such drive was passed around right before our eyes. The temptation to grab it and run was high, but with the boss lurking around the halls, getting the TweakTown Team banned from the show was not an option.

Option 2 had us playing the wait game and luckily we didn't have to wait too long. The day our drive arrived we had to spend a little time building a new workstation based on the GIGABYTE X58A-UD7, the current board that all enthusiasts dream about. Wasting no time, we pulled off a near record time build just like at the SYX PC Race for Charity and were installing Windows 7 x64 in 6 minutes or less.

Our testing showed that while using the GIGABYTE X58A-UD7's SATA 6G ports that the Crucial RealSSD C300 was the fastest drive we have ever tested. Our test results also included results from the RunCore Pro IV, another next generation solid state drive, but based on the SandForce 1500 enterprise controller and paired with consumer grade Multi-Level Cell memory. The level at which the Crucial RealSSD C300 dominated the other drives in our charts lead us to conclude that this is the drive that will dominate the enthusiast class solid state market for the first half of 2010.

Today we are going to make another run at the Crucial RealSSD C300, but this time focus on the drives performance on the Intel ICH SATA 3G. SATA 6G may be the way of the future and even though it is available on a select few motherboards and add-on cards are available for less than 50 USD, the fact is that SATA 3G is everywhere right now.

To spice things up, we have also included in our performance charts the results of the recently tested Intel X25-E and the OCZ Technology Vertex 2 Pro. Reviews of these products will be published over the next month. For now let's see how everything performs at SATA 3G.