Corsair 256 GB Internal (SSD)

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Corsair 256 GB Internal (SSD)

November 16th, 2009 | 1 Comment

SSDs have come a long way in the last six or seven months, not only in terms of capacity and cost but also when it comes to performance. Affordable drives based on JMicron drive controllers – which showed promise but were let down by poor random write speeds – have given way to those powered by dedicated ARM processors and dedicated cache chips.

We’ve already looked at one such drive in the form of OCZ’s Vertex, built around Indilinx’s ‘barefoot platform and it crushed every other MLC based drive on the market at both sequential and random speeds, while suffering very little from the performance degradation that can affect Intel’s SSDs. It was the first SSD we’ve seen that’s substantially faster than a conventional hard disk drive no matter the performance criteria, and it proved worthy of a recommendation.

Today we’re looking at Corsair’s take on an ARM chip and cache enhanced SSD, built using Samsung designed architecture. Considering Indilinx is staffed by ex-Samsung employees the two competing designs will likely share more than a few things in common, so let’s take a closer look.Cracking open the drive’s gorgeous silver casing reveals ten pairs of double stacked Samsung K9MDGZ8U5M 8GB MLC flash memory chips, with another six pairs fitted on the other side to bring the total up to 256GB of storage (238.47GB when formatted). That’s certainly a fair amount of storage for a consumer SSD (we’re not counting PCI-E SSDs as consumer due to their limited availability and bank account demolishing price tags), and is certainly enough for a Windows install and a good few games.

It’s what’s included alongside the standard MLC NAND flash chips that’s interesting though, with Samsung using a 128MB 166MHz DRAM chip as a cache for the drive, with full support for NCQ (native command queuing), although only when the drive is used in AHCI mode. This memory is more commonly used in mobile devices such as sat-navs or mobile phones, and is twice as much as the 64MB of SDRAM used in the OCZ Vertex. Whether this has any effect on drive performance is something we’ll be watching for in our testing.

CORSAIR CMFSSD-256GBG2D 256GB 2.5″ SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive Retail Replacing your hard disk drive with the Corsair P256 SSD willrevolutionize your computing experience. Games launch quicker, your computer starts faster, multiple applications run much smoother,all while running cool and silent. Corsair’s P256 SSD is the optimum SSD for your mobile or desktop computing needs. Its 220MB/s read speed and 200MB/s write speed provide outstanding performance, while the ultra-large 256GB drive capacity provides ample storage for lots of applications, music, pictures and video. Proven Samsung technology guarantees out of the box performance and stability without the need to adjust complex system-levelsettings or update firmware. The speed, capacity, and compatibility of the P256 are supported by the inherent reliability of solid state technology, resulting in a truly optimum solution for your mass storage.

FEATURES: Fast – Games and apps load faster, Windows is more responsive Compatible – The P256 is extensively validated in major computing platforms Stutter free – Samsung controller ensures smooth performance, unlike that of cheaper SSDs Silent – No moving parts means zero noise and high reliability

SPECIFICATIONS: Form Factor – 2.5 inch Unformatted Capacity – 256GB Interface – SATA II Sequential – Read/Write 220 MB/s read / 200 MB/s write DRAM Cache Memory- 128MB Voltage – 5V ±5% Power Consumption – Active 1.5W Power – Idle/Standby/Sleep 0.15W S.M.A.R.T Support – Yes MTBF – 1,000,000 Hours Operating Temperature – 0°C to 70°C Shock – 1500G Weight – 80g