SSD Roundup, Part 2: Crucial's SATA 6Gb/s, WD's First SSD

The SSD market is clearly heating up. For the first time, we’ve received a drive that supports the faster SATA 6Gb/s standard. Unfortunately, it happens to deliver unreliable performance. Moreover, one of the traditional hard drive makers finally decided to enter the SSD market with a brand new product.

This is the second part of our 2010 spring SSD roundup. In part one, we compared offerings from Crucial, Intel, OCZ, Solidata, and Toshiba. Now it’s time to add some newcomers to our revamped testing suite. With Windows 7 and a SATA 6Gb/s add-in card from Highpoint (utilizing a Marvell controller), we’re ready for drives able to deliver 300 MB/s and more of throughput.

One of the new drives, Crucial's RealSSD C300, already reaches this impressive performance number. However, interface and high read numbers alone won’t make it the best SSD product.

We’re also happy to present two other new products: Kingston’s SSDNow V-series upgrade kit and a brand new SSD by Western Digital, the SiliconEdge Blue. If you're already familiar with WD's hard drive portfolio, then you'll remember that a Blue edition represents mainstream products, and this holds true for WD’s first-generation flash SSD.

Let’s look at the new drives and find out who emerges on top.