Hardware Corsair P256 256GB SSD Review

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/06/05/corsair-p256-256gb-ssd-review/1

Corsair releases it's first enthusiast SSD, but as we discovered, it has a serious flaw

 

lol @ vista format oddity - is this something todo with partition 'alignment'? I've seen SSD nerds talking about this alot...

 

how much!?

sigh. being a student sucks.

 

Greetings!

Thanks for those "Random" benchmarks. There we can see how the VelociRaptor beats all other mechanical HDDs.

 

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y but not by enough to make it worth the premium over say a spinpoint F1/7200 imho.

 

Who the hell full formats drives nowadays anyway. It takes hoooooooooooouuuuuuuurrrrrsssss to format >250GB drivers!

 

What are you talking about?! We have the highest percentage of disposable funds out of any demographic or group. Unless you got a rotten deal like one of my friends. Hell, I budget my money for food and booze really well and can usually get a good one or two hundred pounds for spending out of each semester.

On topic: I am looking to get a SSD, but I think I will be waiting 'til around Christmas. By then I should imagine competition in the SSD market will have ramped up significantly, and hopefully they will actually start hitting competitive prices when compared to a typical HDD. Not only that, but strange quirks/life ending issues like the full format problem should easily be solved by then. Time will tell I guess.

 

Thanks, fixed.

 

As excited by I am by these recent additions to the SSD market, that doesn't sound like a bad idea. In the last six months we've seen SSD prices stagnate a bit while new drive controllers came in, and I'm hopefully prices will slide. New firmware is coming out for drives all the time (OCZ has just released it's v1.3 for the Vertex), so performance is only going to get better. When you consider a 60GB Samsung drive 12 months ago would have cost around £500, SSD pricing is still a risky business.

 

Greetings!

Depends on how you setup your HDDs.
I always put the fastest HDD available as the OS/Applications drive and a large capacity HDD as a storage drive.
The VelociRaptor is the fastest available, those random tests show that much better than the sequential tests.

Although SSDs beat soundly all mechanical HDD, am still waiting for the tech to mature before replacing the VR. Too many dust in the air to choose a SSD (controllers, firmwares, OS tweaks, TRIM, high prices, ...).

 

When they get up to 2TB storage for about 200 quid (about 3 years?). I'm in.

Lol, being a student sucks, try being 16 in 3 weeks!

 

allow me to clarify: being a postgrad phd student sucks after you have got used to having far, far more disposable cash working full time for a year.

 

Ah, that makes much more sense! Thanks for clarifying!

 

They really need to sort SSDs out.

Their high price is enough of a caveat to put me off buying them yet, but almost every SSD reviewed seems to have some performance-related problem that makes it sound like more hassle than it's worth.
Right now my conventional hard drives are the loudest thing in my system, so I'm eager to replace them with SSDs, but the technology just isn't inspiring confidence in me yet. nevermind becoming affordable.

 

I'm a little confused as to how much cache this really has - is it 128MB cache or 1GB cache?
The summary from the homepage and the caption on the first picture say 1GB, but then in the text on page 1 you say it's a 128MB chip.
Also, I'm curious, would mechanical hard drives benefit from additional cache? The Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB drive is available with 16MB or 32MB cache, but I don't know which you used in your tests, and I don't know if anybody makes mechanical hard drives with more than 32MB cache.

 

When all the problems are sorted with SSD's. And a 500Gb SSD is around £200and half the speed of an F1 i'll probably get one.
Until then my Samsung F1 1Tb drives will keep me happy!

 

How I envy you...

 

Update the site so it shows 128mb cache not 1gb (going to read the reviewe now)

Samsungs firmwares are stable as well, never had an firmware update yet (corsair use samsung)

I have got the s128 corsair(32mb cache) may not have fast data rate but its the access times that make it very fast

 

The review went as expected apart from full format (that no one ever does and is pointless on ssds), speed of the drive is good

just buy the low priced one you can get with cache on it and only the size you need, norm 128gb should be the aim for os programs and games + an hdd for all other files (use AHIC if you can)

The samsung second gen 128gb ssd you should have an look at next as that goes for £/$ 250 its about the same spec as the 256 samsung drive you just reviews (corsair)

allso please correct all 1gb errors with 128mb correction (some of the pages allso say 1gb looks like 2 did this review)

NCQ works on raid(driver depandant but intel ich supports it) and AHCI (allso work in sata/ide mode only if drivers support it)