14 DAY TRIAL // Micron announced its Crucial-branded C300 solid state drives back in early December, when it claimed that its SSDs would be able to reach read and write speeds of 355MBps and 215MBps, respectively, thanks to their compatibility with the SATA 6Gbps interface. More recently, the RealSSD C300 scored quite big when a review made by Benchmark Reviews.com showed that their data-transfer rates actually exceeded those outlined by the company, namely being of 383/227MBps read/write, when analyzed by the ATTO Disk Benchmark.
The upcoming solid state drives, according to recent reports, will finally come out during the second half of the ongoing month. The reviewers found the SSDs to be almost impervious to any kind of abuse, thanks to their hard metal shell. The drives were found to be capable of reaching the aforementioned speeds thanks to the implementation of the Marvell 88SS9174-BJP2 SSD controller and, of course, the SATA 6Gbps interface. They have a 0.16 ms response time, and perform TRIM garbage collection and Sanitary Erase functions very quickly.
Both the 128GB and 256GB models are built with the high-performance, 34nm multi-level cell NAND Flash memory chips. This is the same technology used in Intel's SSDs and was available to Micron thanks to its joint venture with the chip maker, a venture that has more recently led to the arrival of the 25nm NAND technology. This latest advancement will lead to the possibility of creating SSDs that are both more capacious and less costly.
Among other benefits of the Crucial-branded SSDs found by the reviewers were a low power consumption, impact resistance and the possibility to easily transition from hard drives to solid state drives through a bundled USB-to-SATA adapter cable. The company has been shipping units to distributors since February 2.
The latest reports place the actual launch date of the 128GB and 256GB RealSSD C300 solid state drives on February 22. The drives will be accompanied by a five-year warranty and will have rather high prices, namely of $399 and $799.