For the last couple of years TweakTown has looked to even the playing field in all of our storage reviews by using the same hard drives to test all NAS, external enclosure and RAID controller cards. This week we are retiring our fleet of Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB nearline drives and replacing them with Crucial / Micron 256GB C300s.

The Crucial / Micron C300 offers the highest speed rating in the 200+ GB capacity size and allows us to turn the corner and prepare for a future filled with SATA 6Gbps products. "At this time there are several SATA 6G drives on the market but only the Crucial C300 is able to make use of the available bandwidth in a meaningful way" stated Chris Ramseyer, Storage Editor for TweakTown.

I am sure Chris will enjoy his new storage product test accessories since many of the NAS servers tested in 2009 took up to 24 hours to format, a timeline that should be reduced by a large amount. "The new C300s will allow us to test more products in the same amount of time and show the maximum potential of each NAS and controller card we test. This is a large step forward in storage product testing since it eliminates any reservations about possible performance gains from using other drives to test with. The Crucial C300 is simply the fastest drive larger than 200GB on the market and it will show any shortcomings of the products we test it with."