Slow secondary storage has been the biggest persistent gripe about PC gaming for quite a while now. While CPUs, RAM, graphics cards and system busses have all been improving at a steady rate; hard drives have stayed more or less stagnant for the past decade. Enter the solid state drive. At its most basic level, a SSD has the same basic structure as a USB flash drive: a bunch of NAND flash memory chips, a controller to tie them together, and an interface that talks to the outside world. Where a SSD pulls ahead is, naturally enough, in the performance of those three components. Today we'll be looking at the RealSSD C300 256GB SSD from Crucial. Taking advantage of the still-uncommon SATA 6.0 GBps interface, this drive promises to deliver blisteringly fast performance.

Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB @ TechwareLabs