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Corsair extends line of solid state drives with high-end Extreme series

by Parm Mann on 16 July 2009, 15:45

Tags: X128 (SATA), X64, X32, Corsair

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We thought Corsair hit the SSD (solid state drive) sweet spot with the launch of its P64 and P128 drives late last month.

If you're an enthusiast, however, those Performance-series drives are now yesterday's news as Corsair has just launched its all-new Extreme series.

The Extreme drives, dubbed X128, X64 and X32, are, as the names suggest, available in capacities of 128GB, 64GB and 32GB, respectively. Wanting to up the available performance for the die-hard user, Corsair has swapped out the Samsung controller found in its Performance-series drives in favour of an Indilinx Barefoot controller.

Combined with Samsung MLC NAND flash memory and an on-board 64MB cache, the drives should deliver "blistering, stutter-free performance," says Corsair's vice president of marketing Jim Carlton.

Want numbers? Corsair's quoting sequential read and write speeds of up to 240MB/s and 170MB/s, respectively, for its X128 drive. The lower-capacity X64 and X32 drives, meanwhile, promise sequential read speeds of up to 220MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 135MB/s.

Highlighting the somewhat fickle nature of SSD performance, Corsair also adds that its Extreme-series drives feature end-user upgradeable firmware to allow for new features to be implemented over time. That's without having to wipe the disk, thankfully.

The quirks of SSDs aside, Corsair's Extreme drives offer plenty enough to give a hard-drive based system a major performance boost, and each model - backed by Corsair's two-year warranty - is available to pre-order from SCAN.co.uk*. Prices at the time of writing are listed as £302.21 for the X128, £177.32 for the X64 and £116.74 for the X32.

*As always, UK-based HEXUS.community discussion forum members will benefit from the SCAN2HEXUS Free Shipping initiative, which will save you a further few pounds plus also top-notch, priority customer service and technical support backed up by the SCANcare@HEXUS forum.

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Posted by sayer - Thu 16 Jul 2009 16:57
Interesting, but why are the smaller driver always a bit slower? Is it inherent to the technology? I cant think of any reason myself. It means that the speed isn't that different to the Agility series or the PB22-J's, which is a shame. I guess I am still waiting to see what the 2nd generation Intel drives are like.
Posted by Funkstar - Thu 16 Jul 2009 19:07
sayer
Interesting, but why are the smaller driver always a bit slower? Is it inherent to the technology? I cant think of any reason myself.
Usually because the controller can talk to several banks of memory at the same time.

The numbers indicate that 220MB/s read and 135MB/s write is the speed of the memory, when you doublt up to 128MB you reach the limit of the controller which looks to be 240MB/s read and 170MB/s write.

Going by this, you could speculate that if the controller was faster, you could in theory hit 440MB/s and 270MB/s. This is just pure speculation, though I do believe there is an element of reality in there somewhere :)
Posted by gagaga - Thu 16 Jul 2009 19:14
sayer
Interesting, but why are the smaller driver always a bit slower? Is it inherent to the technology? I cant think of any reason myself. It means that the speed isn't that different to the Agility series or the PB22-J's, which is a shame. I guess I am still waiting to see what the 2nd generation Intel drives are like.

It's all down to the chips - the smaller capacity drives have fewer chips (hence fewer channels), or the chips may be a previous generation (hence lower capacity per chip, plus slower performance).
Posted by drunkenmaster - Fri 17 Jul 2009 02:31
Funkstar
Usually because the controller can talk to several banks of memory at the same time.

The numbers indicate that 220MB/s read and 135MB/s write is the speed of the memory, when you doublt up to 128MB you reach the limit of the controller which looks to be 240MB/s read and 170MB/s write.

Going by this, you could speculate that if the controller was faster, you could in theory hit 440MB/s and 270MB/s. This is just pure speculation, though I do believe there is an element of reality in there somewhere :)

in theory yes, except for several key problems, if the data you are accessing is all from one bank/area then you run into trouble. Its kind of the opposite of platter based drives which have consistant speeds but faster at the beginning or edge of the disc, slower at end/centre of the platter. The issue with SSD's is you only get the max speed writing to all banks at the same time and same for reading. In all honesty I'm not sure how the writing patterns work within ssd's, if it tries to separate out the data as much as possible, but also how that is effected by the drive wear leveling algorithms which could very possible screw that up to a unknowable level.

Thats also assuming that say call it like ide channels on a mobo, think of hard drives like mem chips and the cables as a channel, are certain chips on certain channels only, I assume for simplicity and cheapness thats very likely. However if each chip individually is read/writable at any time then thats not such a problem but I would suspect the former method as it would require a simpler, cheaper controller, and pcb.
Posted by Faiakes - Fri 17 Jul 2009 09:10
Shame.

This mean that the ‘Performance’ series is actually less good than the P series with the Samsung controller. These are basically the same as the OCZ Vertex: great at synthetic tests, used for publicity, but not that great in real world.

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