6Gb/s SATA Crucial SSDs Arrive in February

Yesterday, Lexar Media announced during CES that it's shipping the highest-performing solid-state drive for end consumers--the Crucial RealSSD C300 drive--this month, with the drives expected to arrive at resellers in February. The new SSD supports the new high-speed SATA 6Gb/s interface that pukes tasty read speeds of up to 355 MB/s.

"The Crucial RealSSD C300 drive is the fastest drive we've tested to date," said Robert Wheadon, Lexar Media senior worldwide SSD product manager. "The big 'wow' factor for consumers is a marked improvement in boot-up times — the Crucial RealSSD C300 drive is blazing fast, like no other SSD we've ever seen in the Crucial Performance Lab."

The company said that the 2.5-inch form factor SSDs will arrive in two capacities: 128 GB and 256 GB. Although that's clearly not enough to store all those downloaded videos and music files, the native SATA 6Gb/s support makes the storage reduction worthwhile. Don't have the hardware for the 355 MB/s connection? The Crucial RealSSD is backwards compatible, ready for granny's 3Gb/s interface.

Look for the Crucial SSD to arrive next month at select resellers worldwide. The drives can also be purchase here online at the Crucial store. Expect to pay big bucks though: the current 256 GB SATA II SSD costs $799.99, and its smaller 128 GB cousin costs $449.99.

More on CES 2010.