Today we have in our labs a Crucial RealSSD C300 1.8" SATA solid-state drive. Crucial has shrunk the C300 series into a 1.8" format, especially designed for small notebooks that support 1.8" storage devices. Judging from the results we have already experienced with the C300 2.5" 64GB and 128GB models we should expect another interesting SSD solution here.

The Crucial RealSSD C300 product line is being completed with the 1.8" profile, which is approximately 40% smaller than the standard 2.5" drive, providing a great solid-state storage option for the most portable products such as ultra-thin laptops, netbooks, and tablet PCs - without sacrificing capacity.

Based upon the Micron RealSSD product design and technology, the Crucial RealSSD C300 1.8" drive utilizes (multi-level cell) MLC NAND, controller technology, and optimized NAND management, which together improve boot up and application load times and enhance overall system performance. No moving parts provides for quieter, cooler, and more durable solutions compared to traditional hard disk drives.

We have in our labs the 128GB version of the Crucial RealSSD C300 1.8" SATA SSD (part number CTFDDAA128MAG-1G1), which features an impressive read speed of up to 355MB/s and a write speed up to 215MB/s, natively supports SATA 6Gb/s, and is backwards compatible with the SATA 3Gb/s interface. The RealSSD C300 1.8" is available in three capacity points: 64GB, 128GB and 256GB.. All come backed with a limited three-year warranty.

Crucial is using a Marvell controller for this SSD. Marvell’s controller uses a pair of ARM9 CPUs. The one core handles SATA requests while the other handles NAND requests. In addition, the 128GB version of the drive has 8 34nm MLC NAND chips manufactured by Micron.

The 6Gbps SATA interface offers significantly faster speeds than the 3Gbps controllers found on all other SSDs.

The drive's firmware has been designed by Crucial’s engineers. Provided that the ARM9 CPUs of the Marvell controller are fast enough, the firmware should be adequately architected in order for the drive to work at its full potential. But we'll see more on the drive's performance later on this article.

- Features

• Sequential read speeds up to 355MB/s
• Sequential write speeds up to 140MB/s
• Random 4k READ: 60K IOPS
• SATA 6Gb/s interface
• High-speed Synchronous NAND
• Limited three-year warranty

Specifications: