Final thoughts and rating
There will come a time in the near future when we'll look back and heartily guffaw at paying £2 per GB for SSD storage. In the middle of 2010, however, paying under £2 for a premium SSD, especially low-capacity models, represents a good bet.Crucial is upping the ante by introducing a 64GB version of its super-speedy RealSSD C300 drive with a price tag of £118. Providing oodles of reading speed through a SATA 6Gb/s controller and ONFI 2.1-rated MLC NAND, up to 350MB/s in a best-case scenario, the drive's very average writing speed of 75MB/s, whilst not ideal, isn't a huge letdown, because we reckon that most consumers' usage pattern is based on reads more than writes.
64GB of capacity is just enough to store an operating system and commonly-used programs, making it an ideal boot drive, and the affordable price puts it within the reach of most readers.
SSD pricing is finally dropping, as we see mainstream 60GB SSDs selling for less than £100. Prices will continue to fall as NAND manufacturer IMFT brings 25nm production online, thereby potentially providing twice the capacity for the same cost. But if you need a quality SSD boot drive and aren't planning on writing tons of data to it on a regular basis, the Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB is recommended at £118.
The good
Superb reading speed
£1.85 per GB is good for a premium-quality 64GB drive
Large enough to hold the operating system and commonly-used programs
The not so good
Write performance is very average for the 64GB drive; an issue that doesn't affect SandForce SSDs
HEXUS Rating
Crucial
RealSSD C300 64GB
HEXUS Awards
Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB is available to buy for £118.66, direct from Crucial.HEXUS Right2Reply
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