Corsair SSD - Why bother?

Associate
Joined
6 Jan 2006
Posts
90
I am sure I am not the only person thinking this, but why oh why have Corsair decided to 'join' the SSD market with a first / second gen rebadged device.

First off it clearly looks just like a Samsung drive with a Corsair label covering the nice brushed Alu surface. Second the drive specs are what, Read: Up to 90MB/sec - Write: Up to 70MB/sec. WOW, really.

Third, what's with the price?

I just dont get it. Sure before someone 'corrects' me and points out that it doesn't use the JM controller, which we agree is a good thing, but this thing is £10 cheaper than the also pre-order Apex drive which is seriously quicker (on paper) than this Samsung based drive.

I know that OCUK have it on pre-order, but why?

casw1000
fold4life.com
 
Soldato
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
10,267
Location
Stoke
I'm in agreement that this is just an old Samsung SSD rebadged but here's something Corsair sent me:

There is a key difference between the Corsair Storage Solutions S128 and the majority of MLC SSDs on the market, though, which is the controller technology. The approach we've taken is to bring to market a product that has the best out-of-box compatibility, for the best end-user experience.

The S128 uses specially selected Samsung NAND flash memory and, importantly, it uses a Samsung controller. The majority of non-Intel MLC SSDs use a JMicron602 controller, which is very poor and has some serious, already well-document issues. I’m sure you’ve already seen this, but Anandtech does a good job of explaining it: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=6

Basically, JMicron602-based drives are very poor at handling small files and random writes (i.e. a lot of what Windows does in the background), which can lead to horrible pauses and stutters. The S128 doesn’t suffer from these issues due to the controller. The drive is actually similar to what major OEMs such as Dell and Apple use, for this reason.

The key point is that flashy theoretical read/write figures are pointless if the drive is fundamentally flawed, which is the case for JMicron602-based drives. You have to disable all sorts of features in Windows to reduce the problem, but basically it's a bad product. Multi-tasking highlights the issue too. By waiting and assessing the products and technologies before launching into the market, we avoided launching a similarly flawed product. We’ll launch more products in due course, although I can’t be specific about the products or timings just yet.
 
Soldato
Joined
23 Mar 2005
Posts
3,779
So "it's rubbish, but it's not as rubbish as the competition so we're going to try to fleece you..."

Nice... so for the cost of 2x60Gb 'flawed' drives and a controller card that solves the 'flaw' (and gives about 5x the performance) you can have our drive that is slower than a standard 7200rpm desktop drive...

I'll get my checkbook ;)
 
Associate
Joined
16 Oct 2007
Posts
469
Doesn't the Apex fix the JMicron problem. Also theres the OCZ Vertex, which doesnt have the JMicron, is twice as fast and has 64mb cache.
Also the 120GB says, in the product description on ocuk, that it has 60GB capacity, maybe this has something to do with it :D
 
Last edited:
Associate
Joined
20 Oct 2002
Posts
333
Location
London
Personally i think this is a good product.. as like the cosair reply said.. its built to work.
Only the vertex has a chance of working (outside the massively expensive intels) yes you can get controller cards for all the other Jmicron controller SSDs, and like in other threads there are even some software solutions. But .. the simple fact is.. if your a general consumer who wants to swap out their laptop drive and want to save battery life, as well as have the peace of mind that if they drop it all their data isn't lost this drive will do exactly that out of the box.

This might not be the fastest drive available but its seek time is still massively ahead of mechanical drives .. and its top read/write speed is still faster and consistent than most laptop drives.

if you buy it for the right circumstances these actually sound like quite a good idea.

Cheers
ROfu
 
Soldato
Joined
11 Jul 2007
Posts
2,524
No... that would be the Apex or the Vertex when they arrive shortly.

Well, sure, the Vertex when it ever actually gets in stock (I'm sceptical after waiting months and months for my OCZ NIA to get in stock after it's official 'launch').

We've still yet to see benchmarks and objective opinions on it anyway to confirm that the problems are sorted.

As for the Apex, having to mess about with partition offsets and rebooting to commit Steadystate changes would be a passable bandaid for myself (not to mention it uses up a considerable amount of space on the drive), but I couldn't recommend it to any of my less technical friends. Much better to have something that works out of the box.
Also, the real world PC-Mark tests demolish most of the lead you would expect the Apex to have, so in the real world there won't be a big difference for the general usage patterns most laptops undergo. Sustained read/writes arn't everything, IOPS matter more.

One other thing, i've seen early reviews of the corsair that show Corsair is understating the sustained Read speeds, the reviewer was getting 158mb sustained on HDTune

Anyway, we get ripped here in the UK, In the US you can buy the 80gb X25-m for $399, and the corsair drive for $330. The exchange rate is bad, but not that bad.
 
Last edited:
Associate
Joined
6 Nov 2005
Posts
378
bit of an bump for this as this peeked my intrest the S128 is bit of an strange hdd as transfer rate is not its aim

corsair S128 £180

OCZ vertex 128 £340
(prices are as date of posting)

bit of an update on these things come with 32mb of cache as well (not listed on overclockers tech spec), the disk it self may Seem to be slow in SSD transfer rate 90mb/s Read - 70mb/s Write (150MB/s reads tested { UPDATE - drive was not filled first so it is 90MB/s speeds once filled}) but has no latency issues price of 2 of them are far cheaper then vertex by £300 (£650 for an 256GB vertex / £360 for 2x128GB Corsair) as i use WB Black hdds at this time going to these SSDs should be faster due to the access times (thay use an Samsung Controller not an JMicron hack)

with SSDs data rate is realy not that important, its more an issue if thay can access fast or not, as to why windows takes so long to load on norm HDDS thay die under random IO where as SSDs norm do not have this problem due to 0.1ms access times (upto max of 50ms on this SSD not like JMicron of upto 600ms - 1 sec for stutter happy time)

for £180 each thay are the low priced ones on your list for 128gb and up SSDs as well should be faster then an VelociRaptor (£50 more then an 150GB ver)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWiUW65DX7Y
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
11 Jul 2007
Posts
2,524
The price for them is good, and they are a far better choice for speed than a mechanical drive, but the pb22-j's (and the corsair P series rebrands) should have good availability by next month, giving you over twice the sustained transfer performance at almost the same cost.
 
Soldato
Joined
11 Jul 2007
Posts
2,524
Pretty good 4 way roundup here, Corsair 256GB (pb22-J) ; Kingston 80GB (Intel x25-m) ; OCZ Vertex 128 GB (Indilinx), Supertalent 64GB (Indilinx).
http://hothardware.com/Articles/Four-Way-SSD-Round-Up-Redux-OCZ-Corsair-Kingston-Super-Talent/

The Corsair comes out smiling here, absolutely dominates the pcmark varntage hdd tests. and the Supertalents could be very promising as more sensibly priced 64gb vertexes.

van1.png

van2.png
 
Associate
Joined
6 Nov 2005
Posts
378
i have seen the p256 drive reviews (£100 cheaper then vertex 256GB hdds) but not the same hardware inside (p256 has 128mb cache vs 32mb on the s128) both use samsung

well i am going to get one just for the fun of it (monday mid day) its bound to be far faster then an the new 150gb 2.5 raptors (do to access latency) i do an revew on the thing if you wish, just need get an list of tools at there settings, want to thow some at me
 
Associate
Joined
10 Nov 2002
Posts
416
Try the ATTO disk benchmark utility with everything on default, thats what a lot of people use to show off their SSD drive performance on here.
 
Back
Top Bottom