The Crucial RealSSD 64GB drive showed a satisfactory performance in all our benchmarks. The product offers very high reading speeds, which will reach the 355MB/sec in a best-case scenario, if you are using a SATA2 6GB/sec capable motherboard or have a corresponding add-on PCI card on-board. All those who stick with the 3GB/sec SATA2 motherboards will still enjoy a 260~280MB/sec speed for reading but they will be limited to 75~80MB/sec for writing. Even this performance should be very acceptable if you consider that this product retails for just $150. The drive's average writing speed is not ideal but also isn't a huge letdown, because most consumers' usage pattern is based on reads more than writes.

Putting two of these drives in a RAID configuration would give very nice numbers, if you ask me.

The drive also supports TRIM commands under Windows 7. So far Crucial doesn't offer an utility to manually keep your SSD "clean" of garbage - a very useful option for older OS such as Windows XP. Maybe this operation is done automatically by the drive's firmware, but we are not very sure about this.

If we had to list one negative, that would be the limited 3-year warranty for the drive, while other companies offer up to 10 years for their SSD adding buying confidence.

Even SSDs have been available at the market for quite some time now, their prices have remained high compared to HDDs. For example, Crucial's 256GB version of the RealSSD series retails for more than $700! But at the same time, you will pay just $2.2 per GB for Crucial's latest RealSSD 64GB, which is obviously a good bet for SSD storage. From that point of view, we have no reason not to suggest this product for everyone who needs an SSD with a capacity high enough to store an operating system, commonly-used programs, being fast enough as a boot drive, and of course it is properly-priced.

As we previously mentioned the 64GB drive is not offering a blazing writing performance. But if you need a quality SSD boot drive and aren't planning on writing huge amounts of data to it on a regular basis, the Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB is recommended.

Positive

+ Very high reading up to 355MB/sec when used with SATA2 6GB/sec port
+ Great retail price for such high reading speeds
+ Drive worked great during our benchmarks
+ Supports the TRIM command
+ 3 years of warranty
+ Active forum community

Negative

- Competitors offers more years of warranty
- Writing speeds are limited to ~75-80MB/sec
- Retail package is bare, no desktop mount or cables