Specifications, Availability and Pricing

The big story leading up to now has been the SATA 6G portion of the RealSSD C300. After testing the RunCore Pro V (with the SandForce 1500 controller and MLC NAND flash), it became apparent that SATA II solid state drives still have a few tricks up their sleeve. In the past we have tested drives with very high read and write speeds in the synthetic benchmarks, but when it came to real world performance they fell flat on their face. Armed with this knowledge, we took all of Crucial's blog videos and posts with a grain of salt. Today is the day to verify their claims.

There is not a lot of information floating around on the new Marvell controller. At this time we are not all that concerned about the number of channels in the controller or the amount of cache the controller uses. Today is mainly about testing the drive and seeing what it offers us as far as real world performance.

We were able to find some information on pricing at the 11th hour. In the coming weeks Crucial will have the RealSSD C300 128GB for 499.99 and the 256GB drive for 799.99 USD on Crucial.com. As of today that leaves the RealSSD C300 256GB drive costing just 100 USD more than the Crucial M225 256GB. In the conclusion we will talk more about the overall value offered by the C300 since we don't want to give the performance numbers away so soon.