Micron Technology on Wednesday moved to raise the performance bar for solid-state drives with its latest innovation. The RealSSD C300 SSD is billed as the industry’s fastest for notebooks and desktop PCs.
Indeed, speed is the marketing message behind the new product. According to Micron, the RealSSD C300 paves the way for a more responsive computing experience that includes faster operating-system booting and hibernate times. The new drives also promise faster application loading, faster data transfers, and faster 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.
The Need for Speed
Micron isn’t just blowing technology smoke. Benchmark tests show the C300 is the fastest PC SSD leveraging the industry standard SATA 3Gb/s interface. The performance is further enhanced by natively supporting the next-generation high-speed interface — SATA 6Gb/s.
As Micron explains it, native support of SATA 6Gb/s makes the data path between the host computer and the SSD twice as fast as the SATA 3Gb/s interface. Micron said the C300 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 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,” Klein said. “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…