Item: Corsair P256 256GB Solid State Drive: designed for performance junkies
Author: Tarinder Sandhu

Review: Corsair P256 256GB Solid State Drive: designed for performance junkies

Final thoughts, rating, awards, where2buy.

Corsair's decision to come to the solid-state drive market could only have worked if the arrival was accompanied with a speedy drive; there was little point in releasing a middle-of-the-road SSD from a manufacturer known to push the performance envelope on a continual basis.

Available in 64GB (£138), 128GB (£183), and 256GB (£551) flavours, the two smaller-capacity MLC-based Corsair SSDs don't share the same performance characteristics as the P256, as they ship with 90MB/s read and 70MB/s write performance. The P256 not only doubles capacity but increases speed to 220MB/s read and 200MB/s write, albeit at significant extra cost.

Our performance analysis has shown the Corsair P256 to be a consummate all-round performer, exhibiting excellent perf in most areas and keeping in touch with the class-leading Intel X25-M in most benchmarks. Handily beating it out in large-block sequential write speed, the only hiccup, we suppose, is the small-file random write performance, an area in which the X25-M is known to be exceedingly strong.

£550 for 256GB of SSD storage sounds ridiculously expensive until one evaluates what else available in the same sector. OCZ's similarly-specified 250GB Vertex costs around £650 whilst Intel's 160GB X25-M is currently sold for £560. Large-capacity, high-performance SSDs just aren't cheap, and their performance is such that it's unfair to directly compare their value proposition against mechanical drives.

We've managed to come this far without really mentioning the provenance of the P256. How has Corsair been able to release a super-speedy, large-capacity drive at the first time of asking? The answer lies with the fact that the P256 is, for all intents and purposes, a rebrand of the Samsung PB22-J SSD that's ostensibly aimed at the high-end OEM market and used by the likes of Dell and Lenovo. The Samsung is a touch more expensive to buy, at £560, and doesn't ship with the same warranty cover as Corsair.

The perfect high-capacity SSD then? Not quite, folks, because we'd like to see Corsair update the firmware to include a TRIM command and utility for better drive housekeeping with Windows 7. Random small-size writes could do with a boost too, and we'd love to see the same performance characteristics in a 128GB SSD priced at, say, £250. Endemic to all SSDs, the slowdown issue is hard to get around, for now at least, but it would be advisable for Corsair to release defragging program to keep speeds up.

Bottom line: Corsair's P256 256GB SSD is an ultra-fast SSD whose merits can only be exploited by the user who's high on multitasking. Strong in most areas and competitively priced - if £550 can be thought of as being competitive - it's currently the drive we'd purchase for our ultimate system, based on the criteria of capacity and performance.

HEXUS Rating

We consider any product score above '50%' as a safe buy. The higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy. Simple, straightforward buying advice.

The rating is given in relation to the category the component competes in, therefore the SSD is evaluated with respect to our 'extreme components' criteria.

Corsair P256 256GB SSD

HEXUS Awards

Corsair P256 256GB SSD

HEXUS Where2Buy

The Corsair P256 256GB SSD is listed as pre-order at Scan.co.uk for £551.14.

*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.

The drive is also available from C3Computers.co.uk for £551.14, too.

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considering the size of the drives physically and the price difference between 128gb and 256gb, not to mention the lack of cooling needed to run them, i'd much rather have 2 of the 128gb sized ones RAID'ed for a helluva lot cheaper (£366 vs £551) plus the benefit of even better speeds!
edit: Just read that the speeds aren't as good. Maybe so but i reckon 2 in RAID would be very close to the P256 stats..hmm maybe a review for another day ? ;)

excellent review btw, but a description of what the tools do would maybe make the benchmarks more informative; I had to google the tools used to see what they did (even though all i do is look over the graphs to see which is higher/lower regardless :D)

I was looking at the prices of the 128GB versions, because they look quite tasty, but having seen the performance, I might revert back to the Samsung I was looking at. Cant wait for SSDs to become a better price, like £1/GB…

Is there any word on them making a 128gb version of this drive with the same performance? I'd genuinely be interested in taking the plunge then, but £500-odd quid is just menthol.

You said in the introduction, that the performance of SSD drives degrades as they fill up, and accumulate deleted files, and then you did all your tests on a freshly cleaned empty drive. Hardy real world conditions.

For comparison, can we have some benchmarks where you have filled the drive to the brim with lots of files (of all sorts of sizes), and then deleted just enough for the benchmark to run.

Also, we know from the reviews of older JMicron drives that they occasionally had a problem with appending to log files and the like, causing your whole application to stall. Perhaps a benchmark like this would be helpful

open LOGFILE
for 1 ... 100000
{
    time_benchmark {
        print LOGFILE "some message"
        fsync
    }
    sleep 1
}

And then do a frequency plot on how long those log file writes take, paying particular attention to the slowest 10%. A drive with badly written firmware for moving data around when small writes are needed would really suffer in this scenario.

The other thing, is I wish there was a sensible way to move all the block erase and wear leveling stuff up to the operating system. Linux has a number of filesystems specifically designed for raw flash memory ( jffs and ubifs are the best known ), but as far as I know, no flash drive exposed a raw interface to the flash, that would allow such a flash filing system to be used, and I don't think Microsoft is even developing a flash specific filing system.

At present most people will only see flash specific filing systems used on the internal PCI card flash memory used on Linux netbooks.

funke_munke
Is there any word on them making a 128gb version of this drive with the same performance?

Corsair don't currently make a 128GB version of this drive, but several websites are listing the 128GB Samsung PB22-J (which is what the Corsair P256 is based on) for around £260. I was a bit surprised by this since this is meant to be OEM only. Perhaps Samsung changed their minds?