Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB CTFDDAC256MAG-1G1

Installation



Like any standard Serial ATA drive, installation of the C300 was without issue. The drive was installed and partitioned as shown above. The C300 gives about 238.5GB of usable space. This means that the rest is saved for wear leveling and bad sector replacement. While it is normal to lose space when partitioning and formating, it would nice to see the usable space in the specifications of the drive to know how much you will be getting. This is not just a problem with Crucial's SSDs, though.

As is customary for any SSD that we setup on Linux, the root partition was mounted with noatime. This means that the OS will not update the file access time when retrieving a file. This will cut down on unneeded writes. We did this with the magnetic control drive as well. One of the easiest ways to make it easier to change your distribution is to place the /home directory on a separate partition. This is something we do all the time.

Testing

Asus P6T Deluxe
Intel Core i7 920
»4GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer Red
»Sapphire Radeon 4670
Ubuntu 10.040 x86 (32-bit)
Phoronix Test Suite 2.6.1

Our thoughts of benchmarking a SSD are different than a majority of sites. We're more interested in how the drive performs in a computer to you. This "perceived" speed can be measured by boot up time, login time, and other metrics. We do use a magnetic drive for a control in the benchmarks. In addition, the Ubuntu 10.04 disk utility has a benchmark to show how fast the drive is and what the access times are on the entire drive space. To benchmark, the drive must be blank.

It is also important to note that we run the benchmarks over for three times. The first time is brand new after the OS is installed. The second and third runs take place after the drive has been "dirted" with data. The last run takes place after we dump a load of data (taking /dev/urandom and cat it to a file) to make sure the entire drive is used. We then run the last set. Ubuntu 10.04 comes with kernel 2.6.32. This version does not support TRIM, so the drive had to rely on its own garbage collection algorithm. We are going to do a follow up article with a later kernel and other options to see the support in action.



This is the benchmark built into the disk utility control of Ubuntu 10.04. To measure read and write speeds, it needs the drive to be blank. We did this after about a week of use and other benchmarks. This is a good example of the drive in a "used" state. Unfortunately, we didn't have a 6Gb/s Serial ATA card installed so the drive easily maxed out the 3Gb/s Serial ATA on the motherboard. It was pegged at 285MB/s. This is the maximum speed you'll get from Serial ATA Gen 2. The write are equally as impressive, though. The minimum write speed was 210MB/s. This is very good after being used. Still, we will be performing additional testing and will report results in another article about 6Gb/s performance and making sure the drive is really "dirty" with data.

The graphics below show performance over time. The 320GB magnetic drive is a Seagate 7200.10. This is just a control, we're more interested in how the drive performs over time.



What you can take away from these runs are that the C300 manages to keep its performance. We only had the C300 for a couple of weeks and ran a bunch more benchmarks than we posted. We'll have a follow up after we have some more time to really get the drive full of data over and over. The drive is certainly the fastest we've seen in these tests.

In addition to that, we performed perceptual testing on how the SSD performed over a standard magnetic hard drive. The magnetic storage took 28.5 seconds to reach the login prompt from boot. The RealSSD C300 took a scant 13 seconds. The extra read speeds of this drive and the tiny random access times are a huge benefit for boot up times. From login to ready state, the system hung for both drive for about 20 seconds or so. This was probably due to some proprietary drivers (like the ATI fglrx). The magnetic storage took 35 seconds to reach the ready state and the SSD took 27. Improvements to program loading speeds and perceived speeds of the entire computer were noticeable, even from other SSDs.