Customer Reviews

Crucial Technology 256 GB Crucial RealSSD C300 Series Solid State Drive CTFDDAC256MAG-1G1

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Just thought I'd share my experience on this product. I bought it a month ago after considerable research online and in stores. It was getting unbearable to wait for the HD access on apps and large spreadsheets to load and process. Now everything works like greased lightning (but some large data sets still take a while to load - undoable without the SSD).

The only drawback is price of the new SSDs. I could only afford the 256GB but would have loved the 500GB since I was already using a 500GB traditional spinning media drive. It was a good exercise to downsize my info and consolidate the data to an external firewire800 drive.

This almost makes the macbook pro an instant-on laptop like the new macbook air.

A full review (with photos) is posted here: [...]

An excerpt from my i7-920 Workstation Build Review of 21 November 2009:

""System drives hold ONLY your operating system and your programs. They don't need to be large, but they benefit greatly from being fast.

I'm currently using a Western Digital 300gb Raptor II SATA II drive. 3 years ago this was the fastest system drive available. Soon I'll replace it. With what? When the SSD market bottoms out, which will be very soon, and they offer at least a 256gb SSD (solid state drive) with 200mbps+ transfer speeds for under $300.. then I'll get one. I might get two and put one in my laptop.

Currently SSD's are not as reliable as I'd like them to be. The speed is certainly there, but they're still working out mystery phantom data losses and other issues with the controllers and firmware and for something as important as a system drive I'd want more refinement and even more reliability.

IF I had to replace my system drive today I'd be torn between three types of drives. Another Raptor exactly like what I have, an Intel x25 SSD (the 256gb model is currently about $500), and one of the new SATA II 6gps terabyte drives which are even faster than the Raptor. You WILL notice even a bit of speed increase in a system drive. If you're interested in performance this is where you should spend some money.""

Introduction

Looking back at my own words I predicted a few things, and should have predicted another. SSD's are indeed becoming mainstream, they have become a lot more reliable, they're a lot faster than even back in November, and they have dropped significantly in price. A fast system/program drive very much affects total system performance. However, I should have known the price floor I set would be flexible depending on just how much performance was offered.

Since this review over 100 new SSD's have come to market, several major reliability issues with controllers and data creep have been resolved, the speeds have gotten considerably faster, and the prices overall have dropped significantly. But these weren't the only factors changing my mind. A client showed up at a workshop with a SSD equipped laptop, an older slower SSD from last year, and it was FAST! There's nothing quite like seeing something like this with your own eyes.

Immediately I reviewed the SSD market, read every available review, and started making a list of my top choices. Instantly two things became clear:

1. I'd be getting a SSD

2. I'd be spending a lot more than I initially estimated

I don't feel bad about #2. Why? Because my price floor was set based on the reliability factors and performance benefits gained at that point in time. Performance and reliability have been significantly increased more than offsetting the steep price. At least for me.

Choosing My SSD

After a few weeks of reading reviews and investigating the market it became clear the best performing drive was the Crucial Technologies C300 . Crucial has been in business a long time and a leader in the memory market since day one.

I first started using Crucial products when I realized original equipment RAM that Dell was charging me an arm and leg for, was in fact being supplied by Crucial where I could get it for less than half of Dell's price. In the next decade and over 10 laptops with Crucial memory modules, not one has failed and Crucial has always given me excellent service. In short, it is one of the few technology companies I trust 100%. If you know me, you know this is saying a lot.

At the time of my research Crucial had just released the C300 drives in 128gb and 256gb capacities. Their published specifications showed them to be, by far, the fastest SATA SSD available. Online reviews and testing confirmed this. Crucial also provides an industry standard 3 year warranty.

Features

Let's talk about some of the features that make this drive the best choice.

SATA 6Gb/s Interface

This is one of the very few SATA III SSD's available. Probably because this is the ONLY SSD with speeds that exceed the capability of the SATA II interface. It will work with a SATA II interface, but it requires a SATA III interface to reach its full performance capability of 355MB/s read, and 215MB/s write. Please read below for a short review on a SATA III accessory board.

TRIM Support

Windows 7 fully supports TRIM support which is the industry standard wear leveling solution that helps a SSD retain it's fast speeds despite the natural slowdown that affects all SSD's with sustained read/write cycles. TRIM support helps you maintain your best speeds without a total drive reformat. TRIM support should be vital to your SSD selection so look for your SSD to be TRIM certified.

Low Power Draw

SSD use much less power than their mechanical hard drive counterparts and subsequently generate much less heat. The C300 draws 4.3w average under full load and only .092w at idle.

Size & Vibration Resistance

The Crucial C300 comes in the 2.5" format most commonly found in laptops. At 75g's it's very lightweight helping it achieve 1500g's of shock resistance and 2-500hz at 3.1g of vibration resistance. The MTBF is estimated to be in excess of 1.5 million hours which means you can leave it powered on for the next 10 years without worry.

Asus U3S6 SATA III & USB 3.0 Daughterboard

Most new motherboards and high-end laptops recently released include a SATA III interface. If you're like me and your current motherboard doesn't have SATA III, you can buy the ASUS U3S6 6Gb/s SATA III and USB 3.0 PCIe X4 daughterboard for about USD $30.

The two SATA II ports are on the back of the board and accessible from inside the case like they should be.

The two USB 3.0 ports are on the backplane and accessible from outside the case where you'll need them.

Installation was simple. Mount it in your first available PCIe x4 or greater slot, power up your computer and Vista or Win7 will automatically install the necessary drivers. Alternatively or with XP you can use the included driver disk.

That's it, it's installed and ready to go and on my system was automatically seen by my BIOS and nothing more was needed. $30 to upgrade an older motherboard to both SATA III and USB 3.0 is a bargain, especially from a reliable company like Asus.

Installing the Crucial C300 SSD

The C300 comes neatly packed in a very small box you could almost fit in the back pocket of your jeans. It includes an instruction/warranty manual and the drive. That's it.

The bottom of the drive has the model and serial numbers and all the information you'll need for warranty purposes.

Installation was a breeze, I mounted mine in a 3.5 inch to 2.5 inch adapter (150 baht at Panthip Plaza) and slid it into a 3.5 inch HDD slot. With SSD's you can just as easily stick a piece of double sided tape on the back and stick it wherever is easiest.

I connected a SATA cable between the Asus U3S6 SATA III port and the C300 SSD, and a power cable from my power supply to the C300 SSD. That's it.

Powering up the system my BIOS recognized the SSD as it would any HDD and all that was left was to go into the Drive Manager and initialize and format the SSD. Formatting was fun, I chose the long formatting method and it was done in less than two minutes. When that happens you just know you have a fast drive.

Cloning the System Drive

If you're like me you've spent a lot of time building your system drive and carefully installing and configuring your programs. With an imaging system this can take several days of your free time and these days way too many calls to software manufacturers to reactivate products you own. There must be a better way.

There is! I've always used Norton Ghost for my backup needs and the current version is Norton Ghost 15. Looking through the menu I noticed they have a new "drive copy" feature and the on-line manual recommends it for just this purpose. I gave it a try and when I was done I booted off the SSD and was greeted with a blank Windows screen telling me I was using a non-genuine copy of Windows which would require calling Microsoft to straighten out. No way!

I then made a fresh drive image using the regular backup manager, booted up on the Norton Restore disk, and restored my image to the new SSD. It took 15 minutes. After which I booted off the SSD and it went straight into Windows 7 without an activation and not a single program on this drive required activation. I would highly recommend this method of mirroring an image.

How does it work?

This is the easy part. It works great! With my Raptor HDD it took a good 4-5 minutes to fully boot and load my programs, and admittedly my system is top heavy. With my SSD it takes less than 15-20 seconds for exactly the same thing. Programs load immediately, and by immediately I mean as soon as you touch the return key.

Simple read/write testing reveals I'm reading at about 390mb/s and writing at about 280mb/s. Nothing else on the market comes close. My Windows performance index maxes out at 7.9. It was 5.9 with the Raptor.

A friend liked what he saw and ordered a C300 for his brand new Lenovo W510, a very upper end laptop. He had much the same experience with his installation but because he only has a SATA II in his laptop his Windows performance index was only 7.7.

Summary

Overall I'm really pleased with my performance gains. Really, it feels like I just got a new high powered computer more than it feels like a drive upgrade. Everything is now instant, everything works as it should, and I'm slowly finding new ways to use the extra real estate on the drive to enhance caches, scratch disks, and paging files.

After using a SSD for just two weeks I can say with absolute confidence that I'll never go back to a mechanical drive for my main workstation. In fact, I'm probably going to order two more of these for my laptops. Yes, they provide that much of a performance increase, actually more, to justify the cost. You'll just have to try it to believe the difference.

Final Notes:

o When choosing your SSD don't take the manufacturers listed speeds as gospel. Instead, look for some solid reviews from sites you trust and make sure the listed speeds are backed up by testing.

o A solid warranty is essential. 3 years is standard for quality SSD's. I would also take a close look at personal experiences with how a company handles warranty issues, or search the net for the experiences of others. Nothing would bite more than shelling out top dollar for the latest SSD only to have it break and then have to fight with customer service to get it replaced.

o Note what comes in the box. My C300 came only with a small paper book, no 2.5 to 3.5 inch adapter, no cables, no screws, nothing. Know what you're buying because these small pieces can add to the cost and inconvenience subtracts from value as well.

o IMPORTANT. If you're buying a SSD which benefits from the new 6g/bps SATA III interface, make sure your motherboard has a PCIx x4 slot available at a minimum, AND that your motherboard and chipset supports the latest PCIe 2.0 standard. 2.0 allows 500mbps data flow in both directions, 1.0 is half of that. Half.. means the PCIe bus can't even support the full 3g/bps SATA II speeds. If you plan on using USB 3.0 this becomes even more important as it becomes easy to saturate or max out the PCIe bus and you won't be getting the performance and subsequently the true value of the faster and more expensive 6g/bps SATA III SSD's.. or USB 3.0 devices.

o

o Ironically, this means the older 1366 socket i7 CPU's and their x58 chipset motherboards are the only type out there that fully supports these new speeds and gives you their true performance and value. Look for a new PCIe 3.0 standard by this time next year that will further double the band to 1g/bps flow in both directions or further. With SATA III and USB 3.0 devices now on the market and fast becoming mainstream, your computing experience is about to change in a huge way.

I bought this hard drive and loved the speed boost I got on my Acer 1810TZ. And I didn't even have to sacrifice too much capacity. But then after using it for 3-4 months, one day it started a slow descent into dysfunctionality. Within a day, my laptop would regularly blue screen. I was able to get my data off the hard drive before it went completely kaput. A bad piece I thought and I got it RMA'ed by Crucial. A month or two later, once I had the time, I switched back to the SSD. And here I am a month later back to the same slow descent into dysfunctionality. I'm not sure why, but this Crucial drive is not reliable. I don't recommend it. Maybe it's because Crucial is a flash drive maker and not a hard drive maker so they don't know how to qualify / test their SSDs to hard drive usage pattern standards (this was suggested to me by one of my IT guys). But I would absolutely NOT buy one of these again. I love the speed boost, but I can't stand the unreliability.

The title says it all: 351 MB/s read 210 MB/s write.

My office Intel X25-E (only 64GB and the same price, although SLC) gives 240 and 170.

This is the only SATA III SSD on the market, and it shows the potential of this drive.

I can compile a huge project in Visual Studio 2010 in 1/10 th the time it takes on a regular

drive. Ditto for videos. Random read writes are an unbelievable 50 times faster than a WD Velociraptor.

Other than a PCI-E based SSD (which are rather untested at this point), this is the safest bet.

And Crucial is as solid a memory company as it gets.

Other stuff:

You need SATA 3 cable (and a good one; if you are getting low speeds it is almos always because of a bad cable)

or the wrong port.

I updated the firmware without problems (or wait till they do it on the production versions).

Of course you need a SATA 3 motherboard, such as the Asus P6x58D and a good enough processor or the processor starts

being the bottleneck (say a core i7 975 or 980x).

I run many simultaneous programs at once with this drive. I can honestly say it has saved me from at least five hours of down time (waiting for things to load) this week. It is worth it since I can launch 7 virtual machines in 90 seconds what required 25-30 minutes on a 7200 seagate disk drive. Note that there is a new 256gb Crucial drive available that is faster. I do not know if the new one surpasses the overall performance/reliability of this wonderful system upgrade.

I replaced a 7200 RPM hybrid ssd drive, the one with 4GB of SSD storage to speed things up. I had that in my two week old new 2011 model quad core i7 15" macbook pro and 8GB of memory.

For the basics, I timed my bootup, and how long it took me to get an app connected to the internet, in this instance Adium. Cold boot to logon screen with the hybrid ssd drive was 47.6 seconds, and to adium being connected and me being able to double click a contact to send a message, a total of 1 minute 46 seconds.

After I cloned via CCC to the SSD drive, my boot time actually increased. It took about 10 seconds longer to boot up. Everything screamed once booted, but the long boot process surprised me, until a google search showed that I needed to reset the PRAM on my MBP. Once I did that, I just about fainted. From hitting the power button to logon screen is 16.9 seconds, and the total from hitting the power button until I am typing to a contact in adium is only 32.6 seconds. I'm up and running and active in a chat in just over 30 seconds, compared to 106 seconds.

Apps are, as so many have said, nearly instantaneous. Even Outlook 2011 for Mac which always was a slow starter is up and running in about 2 seconds.

Fortunately I had plenty of free space on that 500GB drive, so could still fit my mac and windows boot camp partition on this one, even if I only have about 25GB to spare. That will go up to about 45 to spare since I'll delete my winclone image of boot camp from my hard drive and just keep a copy on an external firewire drive instead. I haven't played with the windows partition yet since I'm in the process of restoring it now to the newly recreated boot camp partition, and even that process, imaging it from my mac desktop on this physical drive to the boot camp on this physical drive is already nearly done in just the time I wrote this little bit.

Unfortunately the info about the 2010 and 2011 models supporting Trim already were evidently correct, and it ONLY supports it currently with the SSD drives purchased from Apple when the computer is purchased, since this one shows the SSD but specifies "Trim support: no"

So hopefully with 10.7 we'll see them open it up to more than just their own rebranded drives.

Meanwhile I can't wait to do more of the things I do on a daily basis, and find out just how much faster it really is.

I'm very glad I finally caved in and got one, specifically the SATA 3 version of one. It is just the most impressive example of computing I have ever encountered now. Can't wait to run Windows virtually as well and see how it goes.

Edit November 2011:

Been running this for over 8 1/2 months now, still going strong. Still as speedy as ever. Found a way to patch Snow Leopard (and now Lion since Lion didn't support trim on this either by default) to get Trim enabled by the OS, and it's been rock solid. No issues and performance is as good as the day I got it. Best hard drive decision I ever made.

I have one of these drives on an Intel DX58SO2 MB running on the SATAIII port with Win 7 64bit,, all brand new installs, etc. I wrote "warning" on my title because I had lots of trouble with BSOD's. Drivers for this MB are provided by Marvell and are in the MB BIOS and the CD that comes with the Box version of the MB. Win7 will show a SCSI driver from 2006 in device manager but I think it's actually using MV91XX driver,, which is also a Marvell driver. If you buy this (or any other SSD HD) you may be in for some troubleshooting to get it to work right. I think this may be because the drivers (and Microsoft?) haven't gotten polished yet. You may need to adjust "prefetch" and a few other hard drive settings also. Lots of stuff out there on blogs, technet, etc. about these problems. I called Crucial for help at one point and they were'nt much help but they did take my call and at least try. There was no charge for the call and they aren't responsible for the drivers anyway so big ups to Crucial for making this thing in the first place. Aside from that,,, once you get this thing up and running you'll never buy another PC without an SSD HD. It doesn't really get to 355MB/s but still WAY faster than any platter style hard drive. I hated it when I was trying to get it working right but now that it seems to be stable I luv it.

I wanted an apple airbook Pro, but at $1,799 for the top of the line, it made little sense. Especially, since I was going to put windows on it for functionality. Instead, I bought a new acer laptop for $666 and this drive for $466 I now have the speed and functionality I want for $667 less not even mentioning the cost and time of putting windows on the airbook.

Drive is amazingly fast compare to non SSDs. I am very happy.

Installed this hard drive into my macbook pro model late 2010 8 gigs of ram. Instant start ups and shut downs. Improves on an already excellent system. Applications like microsoft office open instantly. Excellent! Can't wait till they come out with a 500 gig hard drive.

This page contains a number of major misconception from people buying this drive, the biggest one being that one has to install the OS from scratch to get best performance and have the partitions aligned under Win 7. This isn't true at all, and one can both align and clone system partitions simultaneously using Acronis boot disk. It is the only disk cloning program to my knowledge that has this functionality.

This is one of the fastest drives under SATA II and the fastest SATA III drive, although this is not meaningful for many systems with the older drive controllers. Boot times relative to a fast conventional 7200 rpm hard drive are more than cut in half, from about 1:10 to 25 seconds. Best investment one can make in your system's performance. Don't waste money on a faster processor and save it by getting a conventional hard drive - faster CPUs make very little difference most of the time - faster drives on the other hand, make a big difference in almost anything the system has to do. Spend the money on an SSD. Don't be afraid to clone your system drive. Don't believe anybody who says that you have to install from scratch.