Corsair have a wide range of products now in the Solid State market, and they are adding the new ‘Performance Pro' series which uses an updated Marvell controller. This controller has worked well before with incompressible data, so we have high hopes for overall performance today. Corsair list drive bandwidth at 515MB/s read and 440 MB/s write, with potentially strong 65,000 IOPS 4k random write performance.
The move to Marvell controller for Corsair with this specific range makes sense, because some of the Sandforce 2281 powered drives suffer when faced with incompressible data, and there are still some reliability issue concerns among the enthusiast audience.
Our recent review of the Samsung 830 Series 512GB SSD highlighted to us that many enthusiast users were interested in ‘Non-Sandforce' powered Solid State drives. Is this new 256GB drive worthy of your attention?
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.