6Gb/s SATA Crucial SSDs Arrive in February
Yesterday, Lexar Media announced during CES that it's shipping the highest-performing solid-state drive for end consumers--the Crucial RealSSD C300 drive--this month, with the drives expected to arrive at resellers in February. The new SSD supports the new high-speed SATA 6Gb/s interface that pukes tasty read speeds of up to 355 MB/s.
"The Crucial RealSSD C300 drive is the fastest drive we've tested to date," said Robert Wheadon, Lexar Media senior worldwide SSD product manager. "The big 'wow' factor for consumers is a marked improvement in boot-up times — the Crucial RealSSD C300 drive is blazing fast, like no other SSD we've ever seen in the Crucial Performance Lab."
The company said that the 2.5-inch form factor SSDs will arrive in two capacities: 128 GB and 256 GB. Although that's clearly not enough to store all those downloaded videos and music files, the native SATA 6Gb/s support makes the storage reduction worthwhile. Don't have the hardware for the 355 MB/s connection? The Crucial RealSSD is backwards compatible, ready for granny's 3Gb/s interface.
Look for the Crucial SSD to arrive next month at select resellers worldwide. The drives can also be purchase here online at the Crucial store. Expect to pay big bucks though: the current 256 GB SATA II SSD costs $799.99, and its smaller 128 GB cousin costs $449.99.
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Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.
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Judging by this article, SSD technology is rapidly changing and we're getting better quality, larger and faster drives for less as the months/weeks goes by.Reply
To prove a point, just think what a High quality 256GB SSD would have cost about 6 months ago.
Even better is the anticipation of what the prices will be on SSD drive 6 months to a year from now and how much more the technology will have improved. :) -
descendency duckmanx88O_o i thought prices were supposed to go down.That's what I paid for my 128 gb SSD, so prices are going down. Especially considering how fast that drive will be.Reply
Too bad it's mostly sustained speeds and not random read speed. -
lensman0419 Actually, if you have EVER seen the random read speed on this drive, you will be impressed! It's 2X the Intel speed on random read and writes.Reply -
lensman0419 BTW, if you take a look at the OCZ Vertex series, most of the 128G MLC drives of INFERIOR performance is going for $400+ on newegg.com. So, I would think given the MUCH higher performance, $349 is actually a REALLY good bargainReply -
vant To Tom's Hardware:Reply
Stop reporting sequential speeds and start focusing on randoms.
Sequential means very little to normal consumers. -
spazoid Vant, this isn't a review, it's the specs as reported by the company producing the drives. As always, they will report the specs that sounds best, and TH can do little but forward the information.Reply -
lashabane Reply...like no other SSD we've ever seen in the Crucial Performance Lab."
Could that be because they've never made this before?