Thursday, December 3rd 2009

Micron Technology Announces RealSSD C300, First SATA 6 Gbps SSD

Micron Technology, Inc. has raised the performance bar for SSDs. The company today announced its RealSSD C300 SSD, the industry's fastest for notebook and desktop PCs. Micron's new RealSSD C300 drive enables users to enjoy a more powerful and responsive computing experience including faster operating system (OS) boot and hibernate times, and speedier application load, data transfer and file copying.

"The C300 SSD not only delivers on all the inherent advantages of SSDs - improved reliability and lower power use - but also leverages a finely tuned architecture and high-speed ONFI 2.1 NAND to provide a whole new level of performance," said Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development at Micron.
While benchmark tests have shown that the C300 SSD is the fastest PC SSD leveraging the industry standard SATA 3Gb/s interface, the SSD performance is further boosted by natively supporting the next generation high-speed interface - SATA 6Gb/s.

What Does SATA 6Gb/s Mean? It's All in the Numbers.
Native support of SATA 6Gb/s means that the data path between the host computer and the SSD is twice as fast as the previous SATA 3Gb/s interface. While some drive architectures require a trade-off between throughput-sensitive and IOPS (Input/Output Per Second)-sensitive data streams, Micron's core design and higher speed interface provides advantages for both. The C300 SSD leverages the SATA 6Gb/s interface to achieve a read throughput speed of up to 355MB/s and a write throughput speed of up to 215MB/s. Using the common PC Mark Vantage scoring system, the C300 SSD turns in a score of 45,000 from the HDD Suite.

"Hard drives gain little performance advantage when using SATA 6Gb/s because of mechanical limitations," said Klein. "As a developer of leading-edge NAND technology, along with our sophisticated controller and firmware innovations, Micron is well positioned to tune our drives to take full advantage of the faster speeds achieved using the SATA 6Gb/s interface. The combination of these technology advancements has enabled the RealSSD C300 drive to far outshine the competition." Designed Using Micron's Industry-Leading 34nm NAND Flash Memory The RealSSD C300 drive leverages Micron's established 34nm MLC NAND flash memory, allowing the company to provide a cost-competitive, high-capacity SSD solution. Bringing another first to SSDs, Micron's 34nm MLC NAND supports the high-speed ONFI 2.1 standard, ensuring the NAND performance keeps pace with the faster SATA 6Gb/s interface.

The drives will be available in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors, with both drives supporting 128GB and 256GB capacities. Micron is currently sampling the C300 SSD in limited quantities and expects to enter production in the first quarter of calendar 2010.

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11 Comments on Micron Technology Announces RealSSD C300, First SATA 6 Gbps SSD

#2
Mussels
Freshwater Moderator
nice.

SSD that can actually use the speed of SATA 6Gb
Posted on Reply
#3
DirectorC
'That was about 800MB of data'

O

M

FG.
Posted on Reply
#4
caleb
He forgot to mention SSD PRICE >= 10 X HDD PRICE.

"just to be fair we put it on 3gig speed" - Its kinda low they think they invented a new wheel and compare their super uber new invention to a technology thats commonly used and almost unchanged for like 20 years.
Posted on Reply
#5
Assimilator
(a) this drive uses 256MB DDR3 as cache
(b) the controller is developed by Micron and Marvell, let's hope it performs better than the previous Marvell SSD controllers...
Posted on Reply
#6
mechtech
I would like to have seen with my own eyes what hdd was used, cause my 640GB WD Black boots close to the same as that ssd, not as fast but a hell of a lot faster than their hdd booted.
Posted on Reply
#7
EnergyFX
My raptors just soiled themselves.
Posted on Reply
#9
Static~Charge
For a more realistic comparison, pit the Micron RealSSD C300 (on a SATA 6Gb/s port) against a Crucial CT256M225 (on a SATA 3Gb/s port). We already know that SSD drives are faster than hard drives. I'd like to see how the RealSSD compares with current SSDs, to find out if it's worth the premium price that Micron is bound to slap on it.
Posted on Reply
#10
BazookaJoe
I have a Question : Although Transfer speeds are great & all, the actual benefit of using an SSD as your boot drive to ease windows-thrash, is NOT in the transfer rates, but in the IOP/s (Input/Output Operations per Second).

Now YES transfer rate is also a factor, but in all honesty if an intel drive at 90mb/second has 4X the IOPS of this drive, then it would STILL boot windows way faster than this drive, as the loading delays are far less about the amount of data, and far more about the trazillions of individual DLL's that need the get fanagled to get Windows and your AV and your Punk-buster and all the other hundreds of Christmas decorations that live next to your task bar clock loaded.

So my real question is, how do the IOPS on this thing look? Because IF they also stack up then this thing is a KILLER...

I only ask as they seem to have specifically left out this stat, knowing full well how important it is.
Posted on Reply
#11
Salsoolo
^and random read/writes

agreed
Posted on Reply
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