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Buying an SSD for your notebook or desktop is nice. You get more consistent performance. Applications launch extremely fast. And if you choose the right SSD, you really curb the painful slowdown of your PC over time. I’ve argued that an SSD is the single best upgrade you can do for your computer, and I still believe that to be the case. However, at the end of the day, it’s a luxury item. It’s like saying that buying a Ferrari will help you accelerate quicker. That may be true, but it’s not necessary.

In the enterprise world however, SSDs are even more important. As we've shown in the past, a single enterprise SSD can replace several 15,000 RPM mechanical drives. You get better performance, much lower power consumption, and if you choose your drive well, more predictable reliability. From the manufacturer's perspective, the enterprise SSD market is more lucrative as cost is less of an issue.

Earlier this year Micron released its RealSSD C300, a consumer MLC drive. Today Micron is announcing the enterprise version of the drive: the RealSSD P300. We dive into the announcement to see what Micron has changed to address this market. Read on.

The promise was high. Crucial was to not only offer better than X25-M performance but also be the first to deliver a 6Gbps SSD. Competing controller makers wouldn't hit 6Gbps until Q3/Q4 at the earliest. Two things stood in Crucial's way: 1) a little company called SandForce and, 2) a pesky set of firmware issues.

With the latter taken care of, and the former dropping prices to be more aggressive in the market, it's about time that we gave Crucial's C300 SSD a good look.

To date, the least expensive SSDs worth consideration have come in at around 0 give or take. Our last roundup looked at the Intel X25-V 40GB, the Kingston SSDNow V Series 30GB, and the OCZ Onyx. Intel uses their own controller, Kingston uses a Toshiba controller, and OCZ uses the Indilinx Amigo controller. Crucial's 64GB C300 is the latest addition to the inexpensive SSD category; it costs 50% more but offers twice the storage of the 30GB drives, which makes it large enough for service as the only drive in your laptop.