The drive
The Nova line is designed to replace the Extreme series launched in mid-2009. Here's how the new drive's vital statistics shape up:| Corsair Nova | 64GB | 128GB |
|---|---|---|
| Read speed (up to) | 270MB/s | 270MB/s |
| Write speed (up to) | 130MB/s |
195MB/s |
| Controller | Indilinx | Indilinx |
| Buffer chip | Elpida | Elpida |
| Buffer size | 64MB | 64MB |
| TRIM support | Yes | Yes |
| Etail price (07/04/10) | £153 |
£293 |
| £ per GB | 2.39 |
2.29 |
The Nova V128 is clad in an anodised aluminium casing that's homogeneous in design.
A large number of chassis still ship without specific support for 2.5in drives. Corsair helpfully adds in an adapter onto which the SSD is secured. It then screws into a regular 3.5in bay: simple and effective.
The Nova's sequential-read speed can be considered high at 270MB/s, but Corsair refrains from adding a SATA 6Gbps connector to the drive, so it's the venerable SATA2 (300Mbps) alongside a power connector.
The vast majority of the cost of an SSD lies with the NAND and, to a lesser extent, the controller-chip and supporting buffer.
Nova is equipped with an Indilinx IDX110M01-LC chip that's practically the same as the one found on the Corsair X128 (Extreme) SSD. The Nova also uses the same Elpida 64MB of drive buffer for stutter-free performance, too.
But the controller is upgraded to support 34nm MLC NAND, which along with TRIM support is the key difference between the two drives. The 128GB Nova uses 16 Intel chips - eight on each side of the PCB - that provide the increased throughput and performance.
Intel recently released a storage driver that enables a drive's TRIM functionality to remain working when used in conjunction with RAIDed spindle-based drives, but this doesn't mean that one can RAID two SSDs and retain the all-important TRIM command.
Not listed on the specification sheet, Corsair has also implemented a system of garbage collection - BCG (background garbage removal) - that, along with TRIM, allows a user to keep their drive(s) at near-peak levels by 'defragging' the SSD whilst it's idling.
Summary
Differentiated from the Extreme Series drive by the use of newer Intel NAND, the 128GB Nova, which is backed by a two-year warranty, looks competent on paper.
