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The Corsair Performance Pro 256GB SSD arrives in a very dramatic, monotone style box with the name, capacity and details on the front.
Corsair include a useful 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch adapter with mounting screws taped to one side.
The drive is protected by a silver aluminum shell which is sealed with four simple screws. Many SSD manufacturers are making it more difficult to get to the insides lately, so this was welcomed.
Corsair have spent extra attention to the insides, placing thermal pads on both sides of the chassis.
The Performance Pro drive is using eight Toshiba 34nm NAND flash memory modules, 32GB each, totaling 256GB. When formatted, this reduces to 238GB. Above, you can see two 256MB NANYA DDR3 1333 DRAM memory modules which are used for caching and garbage collection.
Corsair are using the Marvell 88S-9174 BKK2 controller. This is a popular controller used in some products from Intel and Crucial. Corsair are using a custom firmware for this specific drive, so performance is likely to be different from other products using the same controller.
Read a few reviews about this now, and it seems like a fantastic drive. I would opt for this or the recent samsung drives instead of sandforce, they have too many reliability concerns for my taste.
A lot of manufacturers seem to be distancing themslves a little from sandforce, OCZ etc. I think a lot of negative press surrounded the controllers and companies are looking at other units. This is very well priced. hopefully next year we see 256GB drives for under 250 quid.
Prices are slowly dropping, the ADATA 120GB is good value and this is almost as good. never owned a good SSD before, im still churning away with a shitty old 500gb HDD
My biggest concern with SSD is that they have only been doing the rounds a few years. when can we realistically start seeing failures and data corruption. The first 5 years will be the testing ground. im holding fire.
Corsair had a bad situation with their sandforce drives a while ago, moving to this controller is a wise move. Sandforce may be fast, but I wouldnt touch one with a 10 foot pole. I followed a thread on OCZ forum and Corsairs forum, a lot of people were burned badly. but at least both companies issued replacements. still, I would say logisticially they dont want a similar situation with sandforce again.
Capacity is too small. I hope that Corsair made 512 GB version.