Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB SATA 6Gbps Solid State Drive Review

System Overview & Testing Procedures
The system we are going to be installing the C300 in is comprised of an Intel Core i7 965, Gigabyte X58A-UD3R motherboard, 6GB of memory, Radeon 4870 X2 video card, 1TB SATA drive, Blu-ray drive, and Thermaltake EVO_Blue power supply, all inside the Thermaltake Armor A90 case.

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Before we get into testing let’s open CrystalDiskInfo and take a look. As you can see the drive is running at SATA 6Gbps and supports S.M.A.R.T., 48bit LBA, APM, NCQ, and most importantly TRIM.

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For testing the drive we will be using the following benchmarking programs, we have provided links to each so you can run the benchmarks as well.

– HDTune Pro (download)
– Sandra Physical Disks Benchmark (download)
– ATTO Disk Benchmark (download)
– CrystalDiskMark 64bit (download)
– AS SSD Benchmark (download)

We also made these optimization changes…

– No power saving options in the BIOS
– ACHI enabled in the BIOS
– Windows 7 User Account Control (UAC) is disabled
– Windows 7 power saving settings are disabled

For comparison we will be testing the C300 against these 2 other drives…

– Crucial M225 256GB (Review)
– Corsair Force Series F100 100GB (Review)

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