Tom's Hardware's Summer Guide: 17 SSDs Rounded Up

Crucial RealSSD C300 (64 GB)

The RealSSD C300 is the fastest SSD when it comes to throughput and data transfer. We looked at the 256 GB model a few months ago, and Crucial has made notable progress since then. The drives use Marvell’s 6Gb/s 88SS9174-BJP2.

However, the 64 GB model reviewed here is a far cry from the performance we saw with the 256 GB drive. Although read throughput and total bandwidth are similar and clealy pass the 300 MB/s line, the 64 GB version is limited to just under 80 MB/s on sequential writes. Fortunately, there's hardly any performance drop over time due to wear leveling and write amplification. The 80 MB/s line is dependable, ensuring that the drive will remain much faster than any 2.5” hard drive and superior to most 3.5” drives in many circumstances. Be careful if you require high performance on 4K random writes, though, as most other drives in this review are between 2x and 4x faster.

Crucial's I/O performance is no match for the SandForce SSDs when it comes to file server, database, and workstation workloads. The only exception is the Web server test, which doesn't require writes, and hence really rocks on the RealSSD C300 64 GB.

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