Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB SSD Review

Crucial were kind enough to send me the Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB SSD for review. The Crucial RealSSD C300 series of SSD was the first, and is still the only native SATA 6Gbps SSD on the market as I write this article. The RealSSD C300 is also backwards compatible with SATA 3Gbps, and in this article I will test the RealSSD C300 connected via SATA 6Gbps and also SATA 3Gbps.

Crucial’s parent company “Micron”, manufacture the RealSSD C300 series. Micron is a huge company, and actually manufactures RAM and Flash chips among other related technologies. The Crucial RealSSD C300 is powered by a Marvell SSD controller, and uses Micron’s own 34nm MLC NAND, which is all housed in either a 1.8 inch or 2.5 inch form factor case. In the case of our review sample, we received the 2.5 inch version. The Crucial RealSSD C300 can be installed in a laptop, Netbook, or in our case for this article, the RealSSD C300 was installed on my main review desktop PC.

We’ll find out in this review how this new SSD performs in our range of benchmarks and real world tests.

Crucial company information

I’m sure most MyCE members will be familiar with the Crucial brand name. Crucial has been manufacturing high performance, high quality PC memory, SSDs, and other PC related hardware for many years.

If you would like to find out more about Crucial, you can visit the Crucial website.

Packaging

Box top

As we can see, the package arrived damaged, quite probably by some mishandling by the carrier who delivered the package. However, the RealSSD C300 was well protected inside the box, and there were no visible signs of damage to the SSD itself.

Box bottom

Box front

Box sides

What’s inside the box

Now it’s time to take a look at the drive itself and what the drive came shipped with.

The package contained the Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB SSD itself, an installation guide, and warranty information.

Drive bottom

On the bottom of the drive, we can see the model (CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1), the drive’s capacity, the firmware version of the SSD (0002), and also that the drive was manufactured in Singapore. We can also see the drive’s SATA power and data connectors.

When the drive arrived firmware version 0006 had just become available, so we first updated the firmware to version 0006 before we began the tests.

The Crucial RealSSD C300 is well constructed, in a strong aluminium housing.

Now let’s head to the next page, where we look in more detail at the Crucial RealSSD C300.