Stop By & Check Out My C300 Review (Feat. Marvell, ICH10R, And HPT 640)

[Lsdmeasap]

Hey guys, just thought I would post a link here to my Crucial C300 review, in case anyone interested misses it in the Review section.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=261789

Thanks & Enjoy

[Ao1]

Thanks for review. TBH I’m losing faith with reviewers as they seem to be focused on getting reviews out the door as quickly as possible so their site is first out. It takes a long time to really understand the pitfalls and benefits of a particular SSD, especially if they are based on a new controller.

Rushing a review out often leads to misleading information that seems to stick. I would rather wait for a more considered review that takes the time to really get to know the SSD and my only suggest therefore is to resist the temptation to be first and concentrate on being the best.

BTW that Winbootinfo is a useful little app.

[F@32]

Hey guys, just thought I would post a link here to my Crucial C300 review, in case anyone interested misses it in the Review section.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=261789

Thanks & Enjoy

Hey LSD, are you guys will be featuring AMD BIOSes any time soon for Giga-byte boards? Love your forums, mate. keep up the good work!

Your test proves some other folk's findings that Marvell SATA 3 suck in RAID.

[Lsdmeasap]

Thanks for review. TBH I’m losing faith with reviewers as they seem to be focused on getting reviews out the door as quickly as possible so their site is first out. It takes a long time to really understand the pitfalls and benefits of a particular SSD, especially if they are based on a new controller.

Rushing a review out often leads to misleading information that seems to stick. I would rather wait for a more considered review that takes the time to really get to know the SSD and my only suggest therefore is to resist the temptation to be first and concentrate on being the best.

BTW that Winbootinfo is a useful little app.

I agree, rushing out a review not only can skew results, but often leads to a less than stellar review content-wise.

Ya, Winbootinfo is a great tool!

Hey LSD, are you guys will be featuring AMD BIOSes any time soon for Giga-byte boards? Love your forums, mate. keep up the good work!

Your test proves some other folk's findings that Marvell SATA 3 suck in RAID.

We talked about it, and no one wanted to keep the BIOSes updated for AMD as we only have a few regular AMD users, and not that many AMD people even stop in generally.

Also, we often have a hard time keeping the Intel ones updated for various reasons, so I really doubt we will ever host AMD BIOSes.

Thanks for your approval on my review, I worked for a very long time on it and hearing people approve of my work makes it all worthwhile, so thanks!

I just updated the review, adding in some Marvell RAID results because I had been asked by a few users about it, so a few quick tests and some further comments have been added.

[cx-ray]

Short of my C300 256GB drive being defective I've found a bug I think:
http://www.forum.crucial.com/t5/Soli...-p/23555#M8037

[mbreslin]

Short of my C300 256GB drive being defective I've found a bug I think:
http://www.forum.crucial.com/t5/Soli...-p/23555#M8037

You have a bad drive or some other issue not drive-related.

Is your drive full or close to being full?

Do you use a wireless mouse?

I've had windows installed individually on all 8 of mine, ran all kinds of benchmarks, back to back thrashing the drives. Short of filling them up to near-full, (which is an issue with ssds in general) I can't get any kind of performance degradation, nor the skipping you mention.

My suggestion would be to backup, secure erase and then reinstall.

[cx-ray]

No wireless mouse. At the moment 158GB free space. I secure erased the drive before installing Windows 7 on it. I noticed something weird from day 1 and just got around figuring out what was causing it. The drive also came new sealed from the factory with firmware 0002.

Without TRIM the drive runs 100% normal. It doesn't skip when running benchmarks either even with TRIM is enabled. Just in these normal multitasking low load events I described do the hiccups show up.

I guess I can secure erase it again for a test if no one can reproduce the results as stated in my test examples.

[cx-ray]

I just secure erased the drive with HDDERASE 4 option 1. Installed a completely fresh Windows 7. The problem is still there.

On a fresh install it's very, very, difficult to pick up however. You won't notice it, unless you know what to look for. Provided the drive isn't defective, my guess is that it gets worse over time. Perhaps because TRIM has to perform more work then.

(I better copy this over to the Crucial forum)

[mbreslin]

Pretty weird and I'd guess you have a malfunctioning drive.

[cx-ray]

Pretty weird and I'd guess you have a malfunctioning drive.

Maybe...but I'm not sure Anyway, Crucial have contacted me an requested that I fill out their RMA form. Once their customer service system is back online I'll send it off.

[cx-ray]

Pretty weird and I'd guess you have a malfunctioning drive.

I'm pretty sure now it's not malfunctioning. I picked up a new identical drive from another production batch a few days ago. Again, when filled up to about 160MB free you clearly start to notice system freezing with TRIM enabled. This time I found it out by unraring a movie file with auto delete archive enabled.

Crucial needs to fix their firmware.

[mbreslin]

...Is your drive full or close to being full?...

...Again, when filled up to about 160MB free..

I'm really not surprised at any weird behavior you experience with just 160mb free. Many(most?|all?) SSDs flat out puke when full.

[cx-ray]

I'm really not surprised at any weird behavior you experience with just 160mb free. Many(most?|all?) SSDs flat out puke when full.

I meant 160GB free

[mbreslin]

Well, that sucks. If it's a real issue hopefully they fix it, many people are running c300 as single drives and not reporting any stutter. You're in AHCI mode I assume?

[cx-ray]

Yes, AHCI with msahci.sys driver.

[Anvil]

Why don't you try the Intel RST, that's if your on the Intel chipset.

I've been using my C300s for quite some time, both as single drives and in raid, no stutter at all.

[cx-ray]

Why don't you try the Intel RST, that's if your on the Intel chipset.

I've been using my C300s for quite some time, both as single drives and in raid, no stutter at all.

If you follow the link I pasted in my initial complaint you can see how I tested/figured out what was causing the pauses. The short of the story is that I tried both Intel Rapid Storage Manager v9.​6.​0.​1014 and v10.0.0.1046.

To be honest if the native GC will keep the drives in good shape I'll be happy. Up until now I'm not experiencing any probs with TRIM disabled. I hope it stays like this.

[cx-ray]

Something is coming...links not working yet as of this post time.

[dctokyo]

Thanks for review.

[Lsdmeasap]

Thanks for review.

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed the read!

USB Firmware update available here for anyone that needs it

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-St...-p/24151#M8221

[cx-ray]

I thought I should report back regarding my problems with the TRIM performance of my C300 256GB drives. After FW 0006 the problems are almost gone. It's still not as good as running the drives without TRIM however. The good news is they haven't degraded without TRIM. The native GC appears to be doing an excellent job.