Corsair's ultra speedy 256GB SSD sneaks out, hits the bench
By Darren Murph 
posted Apr 8th 2009 10:26AM
posted Apr 8th 2009 10:26AM
posted Apr 8th 2009 10:26AM
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wow
besides the price, I concur. Wow!
Does anybody know how bad the durabillity of an SSD really is?
Actually unless you put a swap partition or page file on and SSD, it will most likely outlast any spinning drive.
Educate yourself:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
Actually even if you put a swap partition on a SSD your not likely to run into any major problems.
With that said, if you can afford a SSD you can probably afford enough ram not to need a swap file.
Also remember magnetic drives have fairly big fail rates and when they fail often all the data can be lost.
Unfortunately the drive specs don't give the random write performance which is the most important issue for a SSD drive (It's not like your going to be copying large files from one SSD harddrive to another very often).
Nearly $3 a GB. Yikes.
A VelociRaptor 300GB is about half that price, at about $1.50 a GB.
Well, I guess if you got money to burn...
The $ per GB has been dropping like a rock. This is certainly a move in the right direction.
$3/GB is fair, considering that 32GB drives have been selling for nearly $400 for the past few months (Intel X25-M)
I still wouldn't use one for archiving large files, but I'd install my games and extract my downloaded rar/7z/zip files to it.
Yeah, because you so can fit a VelociRaptor into a laptop.
@Patriks7
Why would you waste an expensive drive on an underpowered piece of hardware (laptop)? Sure you can fit this into a laptop and save some battery power while getting fast read/writes but I bet the majority of users are plugging these into hard core all out gaming rigs/desktops.
And of course, you can't fit a VelociRaptor into a laptop, duh....
VelociRaptor 300GB isn't $1.50/GB... the drive is $200 (after rebate) at newegg.. that makes it $0.67 / GB
any1 know what the speed for a SATA2 HDD is for comparisons sake?
ya, http://www.google.com does. Check it out. It's a fairly new site, but I think it has a chance of catching on.
I'd have hoped that with all the exposure Anandtech's SSD articles have gained that manufacturers would have stopped pushing for massive sequential read and write speeds as they nearly always come at the expense of random read and write speeds which do impact massively on real world performance.
Will have to wait for some good benchmarks to see if this is really any good
same here i remember that article at that site,
also werent manufacturers to start trying to use TRIM for increasing a SSD's lifespan ?
TRIM is actually meant to reduce the performance drop of SSD's over time rather than to increase their lifespan.
Maybe because those Anandtech articles sold me, but these benchmark numbers don't mean much until we see some real life performance benchmarks, like if the random write 4kb block numbers on this thing is actually faster than a HDD.
Waiting to win!!
$749 of my tax return: spent before it even got here :D
@PDubNYC
r u kidding me??? don't such a dick! y don't we just get rid of engadget altogether since this awesome new site called google has ALL the answers.
dicks like u should not have a computer.
HAHAHA, well you did ask a question that you could have problem found by searching for it, and you probably could have found the answer in the amount of time it took you to post the comment. Don't be so sensitive. If anyone shouldn't have a computer, it's the type of people who flip out and start name calling when someone jokingly tells them to put some effort into an inquiry.
I'm currently using OCZ's 120G Vertex SSD, and it is all kinds of amazing. I get 180 Reads and 120 Writes, but I saw benchmarks of people using 3 of them in a RAID 0 getting 800MB reads and 600MB writes (ridiculous).
It was definitely more of a hassle to setup than your usual HDD. I had to plug it in as a slave on an existing machine, flash the firmware, partition it, ALIGN the partition (**huge**) and then you could install an OS to it... but if you're okay with and/or familiar with that whole process, it is well worth it.
My boot time is 22 seconds on Windows 7 x64 and the entire OS installed in 17 minutes. I bought it on newegg for somewhere around $270.
ah, looks like it uses the samsung chip and mlc. could be a winner.
@PDubNYC
Just awesome. If people did the 3 minutes of research instead of asking a forum that they might not come back to for the answer, it would save a lot of headaches.
Comparing the avg read/write throughput I would assume (however unassertively) that this uses dual jMicron controllers like many drives out there now. Dual jmicron controllers have the same hangup issues that previous single jmicron controller drives did, especially when multitasking. Look for drives with the Indilinx (sp?) Barefoot controller that has so far been proven to be far superior in terms of everyday usage.
The OCZ Vertex drive is one such drive.
READ this if you're interested in dropping the $300-700+ into one of these drives. Make an informed choice.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3535
Of course if this is run by the new samsung controller, then all bets are off since Samsung creates fantastic controllers.
200MB/sec read and less than 170MB/sec with 256GB storage? OCZ Vertex 250GB model is about the same price with 250MB/sec read and 170MB/sec write and 64MB onboard cache .1ms seek time. This drive is good but it isn't as good as the Vertex series drive. Still, SSDs are way too expensive right now. This type of performance makes me drool but it makes it more expensive. Waiting until prices come waaaay down :P
@PDubNYC and Scott N Worthless
well the thing is, i have no idea what to look for hence why i'm asking the question.
but thank for being so darn helpful.
i've heard that SSD is waaaaaaaaaay faster than HDD but am just trying to find out HOW MUCH faster. any1 know.
This is fantastic article on the merits of SSDs.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
It goes way beyond sequential reads/writes.
thanks very much BEAU, much appreciated and for ANYONE :) needing more info, here's a great page from that article that is a must read...
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=3
Can't wait till these are mainstream items.
No random write bench. Fail.
@livelifexplore
COME ON, KID. Read the Anandtech article everyone's linked to a dozen times. It's a 31 pages analysis of SSDs with speed comparisons to HDDs. You need to seek out what you want in life-- don't just wait for someone to spoon feed it to you. Also, don't spell anyone as "any1". It makes you sound incredibly stupid.
Christ, this is why the Chinese are crushing us.
done, read it, and its all good.
@daniel
those links (all 3 of them) were added AFTER i asked the first time. and i love how asking a simple question turns into me waiting for people to spoon feed me. i hope none of your mates ask you questions, you might tell them to 'seek it out' or to check out google :)
ps, i think u should learn how to count FIRST b4 u tell me how to spell
So, this'll probably be identical to the samsung 256GB? Same specs, same price, same parts, it even looks the same.
Oh, and:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ssd+hdd+comparison
The S128 SSD from Corsair was rock solid. No required firmware updates, and no documented shortcomings of any kind thus far. I can only imagine how good this version is going to be.
This drive is exactly the same as Samsung 256GB MLC SSD that features in "Samsung SSD Awesomeness" viral video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs
@livelifexplore
I know you think this is a joke, but I'm actually trying to help you. Good luck.
Make it SLC, ZIF and a 1.8" drive and I'm all over it!!!