Corsair Neutron XTi 480GB review

1. Introduction2. Corsair Neutron XTi 480GB3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark5. ATTO Disk Benchmark6. AS SSD7. IOMETER8. Real Life File Testing9. Closing Thoughts10. View All Pages

The front of the box features an image of the drive, its capacity and its headline sequential and 4K random IOPS performance numbers. There's also a small list of the drives other features.

On the rear of the box is just some multi lingual marketing text. The only thing bundled in the box is a 2mm spacer to allow the drive to be fitted securely into larger notebooks.

 

The Corsair Neutron XTi is built on a standard 2.5in, 7mm format and the drive stands out from the crowd thanks to its bright red finished metal casing.

The enclosure is of the clip type so to ruin your warranty you need a very small blade to persuade the clips to release.

The Neutron XTi 480GB is another drive whose PCB doesn't fill the enclosure. The top side of the board holds four 64GB Toshiba 15mn MLC NAND packages (coded TP79G5LASA) and a single Nanya NT5CC256M16DP-DI 512MB DDR3-1600 cache IC.

On the flip side of the PCB are four more 64GB Toshiba 15nm NAND packages, the Phison PS3110-S10-X controller and another 512MB cache IC, giving the drive a raw capacity of 512GB with 1GB of cache.

  

Phison's PS3110-S10-X controller is quad core chip (with three cores solely dedicated to Flash management) supporting up to 8-channels of NAND and four-way interleaving. It supports both MLC and TLC  NAND (its Phison's first TLC capable controller) and 256-bit AES encryption as well as end-to-end data path protection.

         
Corsair's SSD management software goes by the name of SSD Toolbox (at the time of writing it's version 1.2.4.2) and is available as a download from Corsair's website.  The open page of the utility provides detailed information about the drive and the ability to check for firmware updates and to implement them.

The next section provides the means to manually adjust the Over Provisioning for the drive. A third page provides S.M.A.R.T details and the Toolbox also provides disk cloning, Trim command scheduling and secure erase support.

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