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doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.
Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives, no programs were installed, just the operating system and a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. The machine was then shut down and once started up we recorded boot times – until we reached a working desktop. We used a digital watch for this and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure. We also included a standard £70 Western Digital 1TB hard drive for comparison purposes.
We didn't think the Intel Raid 0 configuration would be beaten so quickly but it appears as if the Crucial C300 256Gb drive is the ultimate boot drive right now, shaving 2 seconds from our start up time. Granted it costs around £350 more, but if speed is your ultimate goal then this is noticeable.
Snow Leopard 10.6.4 Boot Times
Not everyone uses Windows 7, and although TRIM is only supported by this Operating system, I like to expand results a little when possible. I therefore used my Macintosh MacBook pro 17 inch, Generation 5.1 which is based around a 2.93ghz Core 2 Duo processor with 9600m graphics. There is 8GB of DDR3 ram in this machine with a full 3 Gigabit link speed over the nVidia MCP79 AHCI. I also enabled the full 64bit Kernel and Extensions – if you want to read more, check out this article.
Before we show the results it is worth pointing out that we don't expect to see gains like we did on the Windows 7 platform, because our Macintosh controller is limited to Sata 3Gbps.
Half a second is removed from our time which while not noticeable is going to be as fast as it gets on this platform. If Apple introduce a Sata 6Gbps controller then we would probably have noticed another second or so being deducted from this time.
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!