Corsair's
no stranger to the wild, nimble and reliable world of
solid state storage, but its latest line of 2.5-inch SSDs takes that whole "speed" thing to another level. The aptly-titled Extreme Series is comprised of the X32, X64 and X128, which pack 32GB, 64GB and 128GB of capacity, predictably and respectively. Built using Samsung MLC NAND flash memory and an Indilinx Barefoot controller, these drives have been tested to reach read rates of up to 240MBps and write rates of 170MBps.
Corsair even notes that these are upgradable via future firmware updates, meaning that the upcoming TRIM command for Windows 7 will be but a download away. Per usual, the company's mum on pricing and release details, but unless something has changed since
last week yesterday, the whole lot will be a bit too rich for our blood.
posted Jul 16th 2009 11:09AM
yay....
What's with the mum on pricing? I hate companies that are so secretive about the pricing of their own products.
My guess: holding out till the last minute on pricing keeps the competition from undercutting them before/at product launch.
I just want to know when SSDs will start dropping the prices...
I've been worried about getting an SSD for the fact that future SSD's will be able to do TRIM and help keep write speeds consistent over time....This changes the ball game though, I like it very much.
The Vertex, which is essentially a nearly identical drive, has allowed firmware updates (including preliminary TRIM) for awhile now.
we need sata3 fast. these ssd's are gonna max out sata2 specs soon.
Throw some SSDs on that bitch
can we get some SSDs up in this bitch
There is a HUGE market for affordable SSD's,
surely someone will jump on that soon.
Give me 150gb at around 100 bucks with decent performance and I'm in. : )
If you keep on tracking power of 2. It should go like this: 32, 64, 128, 256, 512.
Sweet spot for me would be 512GB around $150.
@strang why power of 2? I just picked up an 80GB x25-m a couple of days ago. While 460 CDN is a little steep for me, it was easily the BEST performance gain I've ever seen my PC do.
It reminds me of back in the day when you put in 512MB more ram into your 256MB system and saw how fast everything improved.
you guys want some ketchup and mayonnaise with that?
500 for 150..keep dreamin ;)
because binary is made of powers of 2, the memory follows along. hence 1024 kilobytes is a megabyte, 1 gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, etc..
Yeah but this is flash, so its more complex than that. They pump up the read/write rates by using parallel lanes, e.g. multiple independent arrays of flash, so there might be 4, 6, or 8 or more of those. And thus not a power of two. And SSDs generally don't advertise their full capacity, since not doing so allows them to play some tricks for performance and reliability reasons. So again, not always powers of two.
512GB for $150? Good luck cheapo..
When is that intal announcement about bigger, cheaper SSD's going to drop? been waiting for that news.
As much of a drive geek as I am, I had to look up the TRIM command. It's a command from the OS telling the drive that a data block is no longer in use. This allows better optimization/eliminates needless rewrites in SSDs, but it would also help some RAID applications (like the drobo, which has to interpret the file system's data).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_(SSD_command)
Thanks for doing the work. I was just about to google-bing-yahoo it when I saw your comment.
NCIX Canada is listing the 128GB version at $450 CAN (~$400 US)
http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=41204&vpn=CMFSSD-128D1&manufacture=Corsair
they aren't mum on pricing, they are already on pre-order in the UK:
32GB 220MB/s read, 135MB/s write - £117 - http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=1045197
64GB 220MB/s read, 135MB/s write - £177 - http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=1045195
128GB 240MB/s read, 170MB/s write - £302 - http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=1045196
"Samsung MLC NAND flash memory and an Indilinx Barefoot controller"
Why would a drive like this be too expensive? OCZ Vertex series are the same and not that expensive (as far as SSD price goes).
Ya...and the Super Talent Ultradrive ME series are the same as the OCZ Vertex and Corsair X**, but cost only 119 per 32gb.
What's the point in paying so much more for increased transfer speed? It's not going to help unless you have a drive elsewhere that can match it. Latency is an obvious win of course.
um ... for reading data into memory?
SSD, super swanky device
thumb flash drives are reaching 64GB and are around $100... I never understood this SSD market?!
SSDs are more than just flash. They take flash chips, and put them into arrays so they can do processing in parallel. And they add RAM cache. And a controller. And the whole thing has to be packed tightly so the curcuit board is probably multi-layer and thus more expensive. Sure they'll follow the flash cost reduction curve loosely, but its not that simple.
Its like expecting disk drives to get cheaper because the glass platters are cheaper.
Thumb drives and SSDs are an order of magnitude apart in speed.
Question: doing some quick research on TRIM, all OS references point to Windows 7 being able to do it in the future, but are there any that support it now?
Windows 7 RC-whatever supports it now, so yes.
Or do you mean an actually released OS? I did a quick google and I don't think so - it appears that most of the work is done in Linux kernel, but they're sort of waiting on devices before enabling it. (That could be out of date.) I didn't hear anything about support in Snow Leopard, either.
This might be really geeky but every time you guys write something about an SSD I keep expecting you to use that Snake pic again. That was pretty awesome.