- Testbed

We test the SSD in the following testbed

• CPU: Intel Core i7-920 Retail
• Motherboard: Asus P6T Deluxe BIOS 1904
• Memory: Crucial PC3-1066 3x1GB @ DDR3-1333 (CL7)
• Main HDD: Seagate 7200.12 500GB
• VGA: MSI 7600GT Silent
• Windows 7 x64 with all the latest updates installed

Since we haven't installed the operating system to the Crucial SSD, no optimizations were necessay.We made sure that "enable advanced performance" checkbox was ticked (Control Panel-- Device Manager) before performing any test. Below you can see the benchmarking software we used for the tests:

• HDTachRW v3.0.1.0
• HD Tune v4.50 Pro
• Crystal DiskMark v3
• ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46
• ASS SSD Benchmark 1.5xxx
• IOMeter v2006.07.27 with Xtreme Benchmark template

We connected the SSD to a SATA 2 3GB/s port, since out motherboard did not provide a SATA 2 6GB/s interface. If you are also not having a SATA 2 6GB/s motherboard, you can simply use a PCI-e SATA2 6GB/sec card, such as the Highpoint Rocket 620 LF or the Asus U3S6 PCI models. This will allow you to achieve the drive's nominal maximum read/write speeds (355MB/sec).

In addition, its advised to switch the SATA mode from IDE to AHCI, in order to get better performance. Changing from from IDE to AHCI mode is simple: just run this reg file and after reboot and then install Intel's RST v9.6.0.1014 (Intel RAID driver) even if your SSD drive is not connected in a RAID configuration. The Intel RAID driver supports the TRIM commands. The system will also work just fine using Microsoft's standard drivers, reports indicate that the latest Intel 9.6 driver pack offers an even greater performance.

After installation, we run the CrystalDiskInfo utility software, which monitors the installed SDD. As you can see in the screen shot below, the C300 -CTFDDA064MAG SSD Ver.0002 supports the S.M.A.R.T, 48-bit LBA, APM, NCQ and TRIM features:

We start the tests with the HDTachRW software. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices

The trial version of HD Tach measures the sequential read speed (at various points on the device), the random access speed and sequential write speed. We selected the full benchmark.

The drive's reading and writing performance is linear. The reported average reading speed was 246.9 MB/sec under SATA IDE mode and 250.4 MB/sec under SATA AHCI mode. The writing test showed a 81.9 MB/sec and a 80.3 MB/sec for each mode, respectively. The SATA 2 port was maxed out at a burst speed of 267.3MB/sec:

The HD Tune Pro software is also a utility we used to measure the drive's reading performance. The average sequential reading performance of the Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB was 234.3 MB/s for the IDE mode and a little bit higher for the AHCI mode (237.8 MB/s):

We used the same software in order to measure the drive's random reading performance. Again, the results are great, especially under the SATA AHCI mode:

Let's see now the writing performance of the drive. Using the HD Tune Pro, we confirmed a 76.9MB/sec result for the sequential writing task for both IDE and AHCI modes:

The random write tests seems to be slightly benefited from the IDE mode: