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The SSD market is extremely competitive right now and extremely confusing for people looking to purchase a new drive. Should you get a C300 256GB? At the end of the day it is all going to boil down to how much money you have (or want) to spend.
If you are looking for a performance SSD configuration without spending over £200 then we still believe that the Intel X-25 40GB drives in Raid 0 is the most viable and cost effective purchase. With the new Corsair 40GB Force drive due out shortly this is going to spice things up even more. KitGuru will have a full indepth analysis of this drive shortly.
There are some instances when 80GB will not be enough, even for a boot drive and this when the larger, more expensive drives come into play. The Crucial drive we reviewed today is without a doubt the fastest SSD we have tested in our labs to date. It is also the only single drive to outperform the Intel Raid 0 configuration in benchmarks such as ATTO – this is no mean feat and showcases the incredible capabilities of the Marvell 88SS9174 BJP2 controller. We strongly feel this controller is leading the way now and has stolen the performance crown from the SandForce units.
As would be expected, the blazing performance and large storage capacity comes with a hefty price premium, and a rather wallet sapping one at that. In the UK right now the drive costs around £550 inc vat directly from Crucial. Is it worth it? We think so, but if you are working with limited funds then this is going to be way out of your shortlist price point but you hardly need me to tell you that.
Another important point to make is that KitGuru has found that many of the 6Gbps Sata connectors on modern motherboards are not allowing the maximum throughput and we would strongly recommend that you seriously contemplate buying a Highpoint RocketRAID 620 SATA controller from an online retailer, it really is in a class of its own right now. Unfortunately this is going to add another £40 to the overall cost.
KitGuru says: Performance enthusiasts with deeper pockets will already be online ordering a few of these for a Raid 0 configuration. Yes, we envy you. If you're feeling the need for C300 speed, YOYOTech was holding stock here when KitGuru went to press.
Discuss this in our forums or leave a quick comment below.
thats a hell of a drive, shame the 128GB version is significantly slower with write speeds.
550 quid is just too much money for me, but if you had money to spend on this, its a good choice. nice size too,. Interesting info about onboard controllers not being up to the grade either, didnt know that.
Yah, other sites mentioned onboard controllers not being up to the 6 GBps grade either.
It really is such a confusing market, so many controllers out there, indilinx etc. and it seems every new one is that much faster. has to stop soon, we are now in a situation when the onboard controller chips, even on new 6GBps boards arent up to the task!
I went into this review with trepidation, thinking it might suck and thankfully it rocks 🙂 I ordered one a few days ago. I hate ordering stuff before I read reviews about it (well i did on another site but they suck).
Can we have a review of the 128GB version please? the 256gb is too much for me and i want to know if the write speed of the 128GB causes it to be vastly inferior.
Well this is rather sexual 🙂 £550 is a bit much for me, my missus would have my family jewels mounted to a pole if she saw this coming out of our bank account.
Id go for the 128gb model, shame it wasnt reviewed.
There has to be some serious performance for £550, and I think this delivers. Is it worth it? thats another point. for me personally yes it is, and I just ordered one from Crucial direct. ordered from them before and they use special delivery which is quick and reliable 🙂
My Dog died last month and I need cheering up. ordered this for my new intel system. ill regret it later when my credit card bill appears, but right now I dont care. thanks for the review.
Well I just ordered this from crucial and am now going to scan to buy the controller. I cashed in some shares. cant wait 🙂
256GB ? SSD? 350MB/s second? too fast for onboard controllers? ekkkkk. I need one now, but I also need a new car. maybe I could walk to work for a few months? :p
Christ almighty, I take a 2 week holiday and dont have net connection, I come back and ive to read around 20 reviews ! this site kicks some serious ass ! you guys filter all the crap hardware out and review the sweetness !
That performance is stunning. I too would have liked to see the 128GB version reviewed also, as I can’t afford £550
Wow this is incredible. performance is higher than I thought. I wish I could afford this, 128GB model review soon please !
Great review KitGuru, now to sell my wife to make up the money, might get £50 for a start at least.
ah come on man, 256GB, I know this is KitGuru and we love high end hardware, but why not review the 128GB model as well ! its at least in the grasp of some of us. I think 🙂
Great to see some real world testing, I couldnt give a rats ass about some of the synthetic benchmarks sites use,. so while you use them also, a few things like boot time are handy as a quick compare. gives a more rounded overview of the whole thing. Very impressive design from crucial and their teams. I think one of these will be my next purchase whenever I get the opportunity to do so.
Thanks for the writeup, very helpful
The performance is quite staggering really when you see the need for a dedicated controller board to maximise throughput. The only downside obviously is the cost, but in a way this is helping mechanical drive sales as ive seen 2TB hard drives in the UK now for under £100.
Well I think sandforce has just had its ass handed to it 🙂
I have read about the Mobo onboard controller problems so I use the SATA 3GB/s ports and have 2 in RAID 0. This still gives very fast performance loading Win7 in about 18 seconds.
Needless to say that this article went live and the poor guys at YOYOTech sold out almost immediately.
As of Sunday evening:-
– Novatech is showing 3 in stock at £496 – ready for shipment
– Amazon is showing 5 in stock at £508 – but suspiciously they can’t be delivered for 2-4 weeks (well dodgy)
– Misco have loads – probably because they are at the astronomical price of £649
Never tried buying anything from Misco, but if they throw is a couple of return flights to Paris – then maybe they are worth the extar £150 over Novatech 😉
I have 2 C300 64gb drives in RAID 0, and I get 755MB/s read speeds in Sandra!