Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB Sata 3 SSD The 256GB Crucial RealSSD C300 breaks new ground, as it is the first SSD to use a Sata 3.0 interface with its theoretical connection speed of 6GB/second. Alas, the use of Sata 3.0 interface on a conventional hard drive wasn’t so convincing, as revealed in Reg Hardware’s Seagate Barracuda XT review. In closing that piece, the …
"""Will it be worth waiting for internal USB 3.0 SSD's rather than splashing a premium out on these?"""
Internal USB is pretty much a bad idea, especially for anything that's supposed to do more bandwidth. USB, even with 3.0's speed bump, is still not designed for block devices, and if anything, USB would cost more than SATA. It's probably worth waiting for 6gbit SATA hosts and devices to become more popular before doing much with them.
And I have still not seen a review of these 6gbit SSDS with a real controller (Thinking 6gbit SAS, possibly from LSI,) or a real OS (I don't trust anything low-level in Windows to be fast.)
My experiences with the 128GB model on a native SATA3 motherboard are fine:
Crystaldisk gives:
Seq: 317 read, 133 write
512K: 287 read, 134 write
4K: 29 read, 55 write
i.e. it is using the extra bandwidth that SATA3 gives (and you can see the slower write speed of the 128GB model as well)
If I switch to AHCI mode, the sequential read speed actually goes up to over 340, but for some reason that made my real world tests (a big compile) slow down quite a lot, so I switched back to basic SATA.
It's a fact of life that things sometimes go wrong in batches. I always regard the manufacturer's response to the problem as far more important than the fact that you ran into a problem, unless the problems are continuous for much longer than it ought to take to fix them.
It's been two years since anything I ordered from Cruicial failed, and two years ago their response was all one could ask for. No paperwork or paper-chase, my replacement RAM arrived the day after letting them know that my memory had gone bad.
Seq: 345.3 read, 207.0 write
512k: 325.8 read, 212.6 write
4k: 33.03 read, 68.60 write
4kQD32: 218.1 read, 164.4 write.
For reference, I have a Western Digital Caviar Black SATA III 640GB @ 7200RPM in the same system, and it scores:
Seq: 145.0 read, 141.8 write
512k: 53.25 read, 83.92 write
4k: .716 read, 1.355 write
4kQD32: 1.526 read, 1.388 write
I have a Crucial CT256 SSD and it's far and away the best upgrade that I've ever made. Nothing has gone wrong so far and it is on a 5 year guarantee so I'm not too worried. However, what I would note is that the prices of these things is going the wrong way - I paid £350.39 including 15% VAT. I guess these new, higher prices are a result of the weak pound and the return of 17.5% VAT.
Also, yet again this obsession with data rates. The thing that makes the massive difference to the usability of my PC is the random access time for writes and especially reads on the system disk. Even if the fast SATA did increase peak throughput rates over my older drive, it would make precious little difference to 99% of use on the system disk. What takes the vast majority of the elapsed time on most system access is the time for the head to get to the bit of data (seek and rotational delay), not the time to move the actual data.
The reason SSDs are important is reduced latency - not peak data rates. If you are shifting around vast media files using sequential access then it's difficult to justify the cost of the SSD. Random read on an SSD can be 20-30 times faster - sequential throughput might be twice as fast for a price per GB perhaps 20 times higher. If high sequential throughput is your aim, then a RAID HDD setup will give you comparable throughput at a fraction of the cost.
I completely agree with the above, re data rate and latency.
It's a shame that MS OSes are so bloated, and designed so it's hard to make a hard separation between the (read-mostly) software and the (frequently rewritten, bulkier) user data. Linux (everything except /home) fits easily into 32Gb, 16Gb is enough for most. It's a shame that no-one is making a small and really cheap SSD.
Completely agree with you. I have a CT300 256GB running on a MacBook which only supports 3Gb/s SATA and it still flies. The big difference is SSD vs. HD, and that is noticeable immediately. I do look forward to my next MacBook supporting 6Gb/s, but it is definitely worth it even without the faster interface.
Personally it's not just the peformance improvement that would tempt me to put an SSD in my lappy, it's the power consumption drop, and the improvement in battery life. Has anyone done any useful testing around how much more runtime you might expect to gain replacing an HD with an SSD..?
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