We are sitting here at Storage Vision 2011 which is taking place at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas and putting together our first “Hot Off the Press” update after a very exciting sit down with representatives of Crucial/Micron. The topic of interest was the ‘soon to be released’ Crucial/Micron C400 SATA3 SSD. With an expected release date of March …

The home of The SSD Review is snow covered this morning with temperatures hovering at 32 DegF and we are hoping that the Buffalo Airport is not experiencing delays as we start our trip to CES 2011. Our flights depart from Buffalo to Chicago and then our first touch down in Las Vegas which we are truly looking forward to. Our …

HDTune Pro Ver. 4.60 – Random Access HDTune Pro Ver. 4.60 “ Extra Tests 4. PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Suite The SSD Review uses benchmark software called PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Suite to create testing scenarios that might be used in the typical user experience.  There are eight tests in all and the tests performed record the speed of data …

You truly know that your a computer geek when you hollar “Woot” to your first RAID results and have to call up the wife and kids to see.  Quite frankly I don’t think I will ever forget the look of confusion on her face as much as she won’t forget the look of amazement on mine.  She felt a bit …

TRIM IN RAID AND CRUCIAL REALSSDs Before we start, we need to give ample warning that TRIM does not work in RAID.  The most recent release of Intels RST package is 9.6.0.1014. Crucial C300 SSDs are ideal for RAID, more so than the competition, because they have very aggressive garbage collection, or ITGC, which works in a similar fashion to …

10.  Enable Write Caching on Device and Turn Off Write Cache Buffer Flushing. This particular point made the largest difference in performance as you will see. Press the Win7 Start Orb; Left Click ‘Computer’ Right Click on Your RAID Drive; Select Properties; Select Hardware; Double Click on Your RAID volume; Click on Policies; and Check Both Boxes. Take a look …

Crucial C300 256GB RealSSDx2 in RAID0 (16K Stripe) . . . . . . . . . . . . . We left the two true Crucial RAID tests until last to show how great these Crucial drives really are.  Installation for these 256GB drives took 9 minutes and 10 seconds and the boot time is simply amazing at just …

CONCLUSIONS EASE OF INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE The two things that can truly be said about experimenting with RAID0 this past weekend are that it is quick and easy and the performance boost that you see in the typical desktop is absolutely amazing. The only reason that we spent so many hours experimenting was to fine tune and show you how …

TEST BENCH, SOFTWARE AND PROTOCOL TEST BENCH CONFIGURATION Motherboard Asus Rampage III Gene SATA 6Gb/s USB3 CPU Intel i7-930 CPU@2.80Ghz (OCd to 3.2Ghz) RAM 6Gb G.Skill 1600 Triple Channel Graphics MSI N460GTX DDR5 768MB Power Supply OCZ ModXStream-Pro 600w CPU Cooler Cooler Master Hyper 212+ OS Windows 7 64 Bit Ultimate Wifi Belkin Surf & Share Wireless USB Adapter Monitor …

Having disassembled the drive, we can see below that the SSD relies on the SandForce SF-1200 series (SF-1222TA3-SBH) processor along with 12x4GB Intel NAND Flash memory chips (29F32G08AAMDB) for a total of 48GB storage. The available storage for the user is 40Gb as 8GB is allocated for over provisioning and other activities of the firmware itself. This over provisioning helps to …