HD Tune
We'll kick things off with HD Tune, which replaces HD Tach as our synthetic benchmark of choice. Although not necessarily representative of real-world workloads, HD Tune's targeted tests give us a glimpse of a drive's raw capabilities. From there, we can explore whether the drives live up to their potential.

So, yeah, the C300's pretty fast. Although it doesn't eclipse 300MB/s even when connected to the 6Gbps Marvell controller, the RealSSD trumps all the other single-drive configurations on the 3Gbps Intel controller. The 6Gbps interface is good for an additional 50MB/s, leaving only the X25-V array with a higher sustained read speed.

The RealSSD doesn't dominate in writes, but it still turns in an impressive performance, finishing just behind a trio of SandForce-based drives. Interestingly, our motherboard's Marvell controller proves to be a liability here. The C300's write speeds are about 30MB/s slower when connected to this 6Gbps controller.

Next up: some burst-rate tests that should test the cache speed of each drive.

Like Intel's RAID drivers, Marvell's 6Gbps SATA drivers are clearly using a slice of system memory as a read cache. That doesn't seem to be the case for writes, though. When running on the 3Gbps Intel controller, the RealSSD sits in the middle of the pack.

Our HD Tune tests conclude with a look at random access times, which the app separates into 512-byte, 4KB, 64KB, and 1MB transfer sizes.

The RealSSD's read access times are very competitive. It's not the quickest of the bunch at the smallest transfer sizes, but then all the SSDs are amazingly fast up to 64KB. At the 1MB transfer size, the C300 is matched only by the X25-M and X25-V RAID array.

Writes prove to be a little more problematic for the C300, which finds itself lagging behind the faster SSDs by notable margins with the 512-byte and 4KB transfer sizes. The drive fares better with larger transfer sizes and ends up leading the way in the 1MB test.