Micron's new C300 2.5-inch SSDs are incredibly fast. We're talking 50% faster than the current market leaders, and fast enough to downright shame any hard drive. Yeah, there's a new SSD speed champ every week, but these are damned impressive.
The C300 SSDs, available in 128GB and 256GB capacities when they're released sometime early next year, whups the current top dogs in read/write speeds. It's also the first to take advantage of the new SATA 3.0, which allows 6Gb/s throughput, twice that of SATA 2.0—but regardless of whether it's using 2.0 or 3.0, it's still blazingly fast. It's rated at 355MB/s read and 215MB/s write—for comparison, the champ, OCZ's Agility EX, gets 255MB/s and 195MB/s read and write speeds, respectively. You can see it compared with "a market leader" (probably either the OCZ or maybe Intel's X25-M) here:
By using the new ONFI 2.1 specification, it's also got nearly five times the data speed per transfer, which is basically means you'll be seeing improved performance while multitasking.
The C300 series is expensive, obviously, at about $350 for the 128GB and $715 for the 256GB (and then only when bought in bulk), but it's a pretty incredible performer—hopefully we'll be seeing it in some equally impressive laptops when it's released next year. [Micron]
