DailyTech - Corsair Launches Extreme Series SSDs

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Hardware Corsair Launches Extreme Series SSDs
Shane McGlaun (Blog) - July 16, 2009 11:00 AM

32 comment(s) - last by leexgx.. on Jul 21 at 2:15 PM

Corsair X128 SSD (Source: Corsair)

Corsair's new SSDs offer 170MB/s write speeds

Corsair has launched its new Extreme series of SSDs that use the Indilinx Barefoot controller offering up to 240MB/sec read and 170MB/sec write speeds. The new SSDs will be available with 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB capacities.

The Extreme series SSDs use Samsung MLC flash memory and has been designed to be the highest performing SSDs on the market. The series also offers upgradable firmware to allow for the addition of new features like the TRIM command for Windows 7 to help maintain performance over time. Corsair says that the updates will be available from its website and that the updates can be applied without wiping the data from the drive.

"The combination of the Indilinx Barefoot controller, Samsung flash memory, and 64MB of on-board cache delivers blistering, stutter-free performance, eliminating the bottleneck imposed by traditional mechanical hard disks," said Jim Carlton, VP of Marketing at Corsair. "The new Extreme Series SSDs are ideal for use as primary drives in desktop and notebooks systems, and also for RAID 0 configurations in high-performance desktops for enthusiasts who want extreme performance."

The drives also sport a 64MB DRAM cache and have a MTBF of over 100 years. All of the drives in the series use the SATA II 3.0Gb/s interface and use a standard 2.5-inch form factor. Pricing for the SSD line is unknown at this time.

The last SSD series Corsair launched was the P256 with a larger cache and more that was priced at about $700.

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1 Dollar / GB

By Sdaas on 7/16/2009 11:29:08 AM , Rating: 2

I will be wowed when they drop the prices to 1 Dollar / GB. Hopefully in the next few years I can just load all of our work workstations with a decent quality SSDs. Its Especially useful since our policy is to put all data on External HDD.

RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By XZerg on 7/16/09, Rating: -1

By XZerg on 7/16/2009 11:44:30 AM , Rating: -1

no thanks... I would still stick to traditional drives for which the price is about 8cents/GB. The performance difference for an end user like me will be negligible for most part except load times. Yes copying a million tiny files will definitely take much longer time on spindle drives but how often do I do that?

So the only real benefits at the moment I see with the SSD are: power savings, noise, heat, and no moving parts. But for those it is pretty hard for me to justify $1/GB. I would be happy if the premium was about 2x and no more. Why? Well you are not exactly going to shell out $250 for 64GB and live with just that being your drive on your desktop. So you have a spindle drive to make up for your lack of space on SSD. Hence negating most of the benefits of SSD - noise, heat, no moving parts and power savings.

In this era you need space in orders of 500GB minimum to store decent amount of media, documents, programs, ... Windows 7 and programs installation will by themselves demand 40-50GB. So until I see a SSD drive with 1TB for about $200 or less, it is pointless.

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By hmurchison on 7/16/2009 12:01:16 PM , Rating: 5

negligible performance difference? Yes ..you continue to believe that illusion.

SSD are order of magnitude faster in latency and random read/writes even the lower performing units.

This is somewhat of a Strawman argument.

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By XZerg on 7/16/09, Rating: -1

RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By hmurchison on 7/16/2009 12:24:04 PM , Rating: 2

Show the importance of latency.

The more we move to multi-core sytems the more the OS and applications will assume that there are uncongested compute resources available.

I understand that people don't want to pay a premium for SSD that's fine but there are significant advantages to having such performance.

I disagree with spending a premium for CPU/GPU. Today the slowest subsystem in your computer is the storage. It's is orders of magnitude slower than RAM or the DRAM caches available. So while you may feel like you're doing a great by purchasing that 2.93Ghz processor over the 2.66 you're really netting an almost imperceptable 10% improvement in speed. Your app may launch 15 milliseconds faster on the 2.93Ghz. With an SSD you've directly attacked the slowest subsystem in the computer which means you've impacted the system in a global and positive way.

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By Souka on 7/16/2009 1:11:23 PM , Rating: 2

We dropped some 64GB Intel SSDs in our solidworks 2009 worksstations... upgrading from WD Velociraptor 10k rpm drives that were running a RAID-0 config...

Such a massive improvement in application performance...well worth the $400 we spent per drive.

SSD Latency just plain rocks

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By CommodoreVic20 on 7/16/2009 12:41:56 PM , Rating: 1

What are you using DOS 3.1? I use XP and Vista with 3 and 4 gigs of ram, fast quad cpus, 1 TB Seagate sata3.0 drives. In Vista the drive is used EXTENSIVELY, regardless of what you do. In XP, if you do anything other than email, you use the drive a lot. Boot times are painful. Loading Photoshop is painful. Launching ThunderBird or Outlook is painful. Running any professional app is painful, 3Dmax, Visual Studio, don't even get me started on Subversion.

GAMES!? Loading times in Supreme Commander are painful. Call of Duty!? HELLO!? what games are you running mine sweeper?

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By Funksultan on 7/16/2009 1:02:53 PM , Rating: 2

Geez, don't have a stroke Vic.

Let's say he's a WoW addict. He spends 4 to 8 hrs a day playing WoW on his current computer, and that's pretty much all he does. We'll even assume he turns the machine off every day.

When the game is up and running on his HDD, it's perfectly flawless. Yes, there are zone times of 10-15 seconds, but is it worth it for him to pay such a premium to save 2 min on boot, and maybe a total of 1 min on loads?

Tell me what HUGE difference a SDD is gonna make to him.

News Flash: Everyone doesn't use their computer for the things YOU do.

Not News Flash: Mine Sweeper iz teh roxorz.

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By Kary on 7/16/2009 2:21:24 PM , Rating: 2

LOL, just caught me as funny because I just reformatted my computer and WoW and the page file are the only things on my SSD now :)
(it's only 30Gigs and I'm running Win 7...reconfiguring a Release Candidate OS to run on that tiny drive was more than it was worth to me vs putting them on a 1TB drive, but some APPs...)

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By tonyXcom on 7/16/2009 12:55:47 PM , Rating: 2

Says the guy that has obviously never used a computer with an SSD. I upgrade platforms at least once every 2 years and have used Raptors, Velociraptors, and even 15K SAS drives and for as long as I have been using computers, I have never seen a performance increase anywhere close to the magnitude that the Intel X25M gave my brand spanking new laptop last year.

I have since converted 3 of my most used computers to SSD and anytime I use a computer without one, I am reminded of how much slower a platter based drive is.

I think price is a lousy argument if you don't compare performance at the same time.

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By XZerg on 7/16/2009 5:07:55 PM , Rating: 1

So how much performance boost am I going to see for doing the following:

1. Browsing Internet
2. Checking Emails with Thunderbird/Outlook
3. Music
4. Videos
5. Programming (most time programming, not compiling and running every other minute)

1-4 that's what the majority of the people out there are using their computers for. For them SSD's premium makes very little sense still.

There are those who actually push their system for say heavy duty gaming, large graphics editing, ... For them there could be noticeable difference. Although for the ones that are not constantly reading/writing to hdd, you are better off adding that extra money towards better CPU/GPU/RAM (more).

But then again my comments were based on my usage, not everyone else's usage!

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By someguy123 on 7/16/2009 5:50:43 PM , Rating: 2

you'll see these programs loading absolutely instantly and compiling much faster....if you spent the entire day programming and not eventually compiling/debugging, what the hell are you doing? are we to believe you are some magical perfect coder? If so i'd like to hire you as soon as possible.

at the same time, if 1-4 is all they did, why would they even need a high performing PC in the first place?

looks like you're splitting hairs in an attempt to persuade yourself more than anything else. this type of performance is a luxury, and increasing the response time/loading time of everything on the system is quite a decent speed increase for those who can afford it.

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By PrezWeezy on 7/16/2009 6:56:18 PM , Rating: 4

What most people don't realize (and Anand did a great job of explaining) is that your computer is constantly writing 4Kb files. So you are always writing to the drive. Where platter based drives have a problem is that it tries to write that file and read something at the same time. When you do that you have to queue the commands which leads to latency. If you have a slow enough drive you will start to see even your mouse move slower. Internet explorer writes a cache when you browse the internet, email is writing/ready constantly, don't even get me started on media. The one place you will probably see no difference at all is programming. But your other arguments are flawed.

Go read Anandtech's SSD Anthology cover to cover and you will really understand why SSD's make such a huge difference.

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By SSDMaster on 7/17/2009 10:12:31 AM , Rating: 2

You've obviously never tried out an SSD xZerg.
You ask how much of a performance boost will you get?
Go buy one and find out instead of extrapolating.

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By DeepBlue1975 on 7/16/2009 4:16:20 PM , Rating: 2

Do you know what the paging file is and how it works?

Do you think it justs rights a big chunk of data every several minutes?

Have you ever seen how your favorite program's installations are composed? how many files a game or program does include and the size of them?

Do you know what a DLL is and how it is used?

Do you ever browse the internet, generating cookies, lots of small cache files and the likes?

Ever tried using firefox with 20+ open tabs?

Do you know how many files are included in your operating system?

Do you know that gaming is not the only heavy task you can use your PC for?

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By leexgx on 7/20/2009 9:20:43 AM , Rating: 1

quote:
So better to spend the premium on RAM/CPU/GPU which will get you the best bang for your $$$ for what you do!

talking out of your arse if you never used SSD (with cache) before you just cant comment on the topic

first time you go from HDD to SSD is like you just got an new super fast computer, the HDD in your system right now is what makes it slow even in lower end systems you notice it right away going to SSD, insane improvement if its for an laptop, the Price is whats going to hold it back at this time once 256gb hits say £/$100, but if your an gamer or laptop user best thing you can ever buy or even just an home computer, as i know some that pay £1000 every 5-6 years going all out on the moderate high end systems so be good for them

i got an Corsair S128 yes the data rates are Slow compared even to an HDD (90MB/s read 70MB Write) but its the latency/access times is what makes the system slow on an HDD not the data rate that makes the system respond fast, with SSD vista can mess around doing lots of Disk trashing, SSD will jsut do it right away where as HDD just go ver slow under the load

basically i can open any thing i want soon as i can see my desktop with this SSD boot time is less then 30 secs (about 10 secs of that is post)i can reboot my pc from desktop and be Back at desktop in 1 min (this is an 3 months old install as well)

below is an link to my HD tune Pro random access test (do remember this is an Slow SSD and its wipeing the floor of an WD Black HDD, the thing is the results from an Fast SSD are about the same apart form the IOPS on the 512bytes are 2x higher)
http://rd1ugg.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pkrBvQeQLtAy...

WHY it is Point less to RAID SSDs as all your getting is data rate at best (10% improvement is systemspeed but not noticeable and if any thing your access times will go up due to RAID) if your RAIDing SSD its more epeen in benchmarks then any thing els unless you messing with 5gb files often (programs and games do not count )
you Lose TRIM support so why corsair is recommending to use RAID 0 is Stupid as they Degrade more so as they are using Indilinx thay degrade a lot faster then samsung/intel based SSDs (the controller not the ram before you comment) and the wiper trim tool will not work on RAID at this time

as long as you buy an SSD that has cache on it (i recommend samsung over Indilinx) just buy an cheap 128gb SSD (bigger the SSD the longer it will last) and 64gb is to small keep 20gb free on SSDs to keep them happy

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By 8steve8 on 7/19/2009 4:29:14 PM , Rating: 2

orders of magnitude faster in read latency. yes.
orders of magnitude faster in write latency, not really:

http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=276

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By h0kiez on 7/16/2009 1:42:40 PM , Rating: 2

For a notebook, I don't need a huge drive, so at a certain point, cost ceases to matter. If an SSD is $50 for what I need and a comparable HDD is $3, it's not that big of a difference. And your analysis that completely discounts load times of programs, game levels, etc. is way off base.

Since when does Win7 and a few programs demand 40-50GB? That's insane. I have several computers with 160GB hard drives still and haven't been tempted to upgrade yet.

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By geddarkstorm on 7/16/2009 2:36:23 PM , Rating: 2

Sorry, XZerg, but you are quite off when talking about the benefits of SSDs performance wise (the only area HDDs outperform current SSDs is in size, that's it). Take a look at this roundup for harddrives and SSDs, all compared together http://techreport.com/articles.x/17183 . Should be fairly obvious what a significant advantage SSDs have in every day computing life, and load times.

Now, if that advantage is worth the price premium per GB, that's up to the individual's preference, especially depending on usage habits.

BTW, Windows 7 and quite a few programs installed do NOT take up 40-50 gigs. I have my Windows 7 RC1 installed on a 50 gig partition of my HDD, and currently it with all my normal apps only takes up around 20% of that space. SSDs are more than big enough for me, for instance.

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RE: 1 Dollar / GB

By geddarkstorm on 7/16/2009 2:40:20 PM , Rating: 2

Ok, probably more like 30-40% of the 50 gigs, but still quite under half :P, and I have everything I need installed.

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Oooohh Aaaah sequential speeds

By hmurchison on 7/16/2009 11:20:42 AM , Rating: 2

SSD vendors are sounding like total tools. Thanks for attempting to wow me with your sequential speeds. I'll keep that in mind when I do my next large file copy.

Meanwhile Intel's cleaning Indilinx, Samsung and everyones clock where it matters Random Read/Writes.

RE: Oooohh Aaaah sequential speeds

By dastruch on 7/16/2009 11:55:05 AM , Rating: 2

Intel's 2nd gen 34nm SSDs are already listed in Europe and Japan but still no word about them. I just can't stop myself from pre-ordering at least one but with all those new drives with improved Samsung and Indilinx controllers it should be wise to hold a month or two more and watch the prices hopefully go down.

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RE: Oooohh Aaaah sequential speeds

By hmurchison on 7/16/2009 12:08:16 PM , Rating: 2

TRIM support would be nice as well but I figure it'll be a year or more before we get TRIM and maybe some other benefits from smarter controllers.

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RE: Oooohh Aaaah sequential speeds

By Kary on 7/16/2009 2:23:03 PM , Rating: 2

OCZ Vertex has TRIM now....if you have Windows 7 RC :)

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RE: Oooohh Aaaah sequential speeds

By leexgx on 7/21/2009 2:15:55 PM , Rating: 2

they do not have Full ATA TRIM support only via wiper tool (an update will come out to support Full TRIM when windows 7 comes out)

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RE: Oooohh Aaaah sequential speeds

By Chaser on 7/16/2009 11:59:32 AM , Rating: 1

Sure for nearly twice the price of the competition.

Where's trim for Intel's nearly 1 year old drives? Nada.

Random writes? OK. Lets look at others

Sequential Write (2MB Block, 1 IO) IOPS Transfer Rate Average Latency (ms)
Intel X25-M 35.5 71 MB/s 28.2 ms
OCZ Vertex 1275 67.7 135.3 MB/s 14.8 ms
OCZ Vertex 0112 46.7 93.4 MB/s 21.4 ms

Spanked.
Sequential Read (2MB Block, 1 IO) IOPS Transfer Rate Average Latency (ms)
Intel X25-M 115.1 230.2 MB/s 8.7 ms
OCZ Vertex 1275 127.9 255.9 MB/s 7.8 ms
OCZ Vertex 0112 125.1 250.1 MB/s 8.0 ms

And again.

File copy and creation rates? Intel loses again.

Lastly:

Cost Per GB from Newegg.com
Intel X25-M 80GB $4.29
OCZ Vertex 120GB $2.91

Sorry Intel. I'll stick with the "tools." Thanks.

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RE: Oooohh Aaaah sequential speeds

By hmurchison on 7/16/2009 12:05:49 PM , Rating: 2

Sequential is the only area the other SSD stand a chance. Though it just so happens that a vast majority of the tasks I do on my computer benefit from faster random read/writes.

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RE: Oooohh Aaaah sequential speeds

By someguy123 on 7/16/2009 6:01:33 PM , Rating: 2

maybe you should actually read what you're posting before you're posting...

quote:
Random writes? OK. Lets look at others
Sequential Write (2MB Block, 1 IO)
Sequential Read

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=670&type=expe...
intel has the highest iops and fastest random write response time of all drives in the majority of tests.

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Hmm...

By CurseTheSky on 7/16/2009 11:39:45 AM , Rating: 4

Maybe this will start a price war between Corsair and OCZ. Hopefully it'll even affect the price of the Intel / Kingston drives.

Someone call me when a fast and reliable 128 GB SSD hits $200.

SSD no Brainer

By AlmostExAMD on 7/17/2009 12:54:11 AM , Rating: 2

For those that argue against them have you even used one at least?
It's by far the best upgrade you could possibly do to your pc at the present time,Well worth the price which is coming down at a rapid rate anyway.
I would rather buy a cpu 1 step lower in clock speed and use that money saved to buy the SSD,THAT'S HOW FRIGGIN GOOD they are! Windows boots up over 2 times faster now.
No more going to make a coffee while the pc boots up ;)

RE: SSD no Brainer

By rippleyaliens on 7/17/2009 1:46:06 AM , Rating: 2

Once again...
If you need over 64GB installed on your desktop, with os/apps, etc.. GET A SECOND 64, OR just use the 64 and a 1tb standard hard drive. Me i got ancy.. it was either the second gtx 275 or, the 2x64gb ssd's (El cheapo from microcenter).. HOLY MOTHER.. 2 of those drives striped, i just could not believe the performance.. R/W, were noticeably faster, granted my old hard disk subsystem, consisted of 2x 300GB sas 15k drives. Compaired against a 1TB wd Black, it was night and day. Boot up speed, Fast, but no big deal, BUT once the OS was booted, oh man.. Outlook, in-which my outlook is wellll beyond 8gb for a backup of my pst.. ALL MEH emails, i keep.. 3 monitors, etc.. EVERY single app loads like almost instantly. Showed my friend, he went and bought 2x128gb,s...

SSD's At their current implementation are geared for laptops, and power desktops, with second hard drives. Same argument could be considered on why would people buy Cheetah 15k drives, or WD raptors.. Some people play on their computer, some people work on their computer, THEN THERE ARE THE SERIOUS PC users, that want performance. $800 for the top of the line SSD's (in which i shall be getting), is just a small investment, considering the performance benefit i get. Hell, i recall not that long ago, 3years agi, i bought, a $700 video card, in which i thought would be the bomb,, 3 years later, for $100 i can get a card that destroys that 700 card.. I just cant see a SSD being 3-4 x the performance in 3 years.. Definetly not a hard drive. AND BTW 1SSD that i have, outperforms my 2x 15k drives striped on a raid controller.. I WAS SOLD..

SPEED, performance, and top notch system, isnt for everyone... Noobs, stay on hd's keep ya porn,, i have a need for speed

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Just another Corsair rebadge

By chizow on 7/16/2009 12:32:00 PM , Rating: 2

Corsair isn't breaking any new ground here, this X series looks like its the same OEM SSDs that OCZ has been selling under the Vertex line for some time. Corsair also recently launched their P series, which is actually the same Samsung OEM gen 2 controller drives that are selling as OCZ Summit line.

I'm actually surprised Corsair is marketing this drive as being faster than their P series (Summit/Samsung Gen2) drive. While the X Series (Vertex/Indilinx) has slightly higher seq read speeds, the P series (Summit/Samsung Gen2) offer slightly higher seq write speeds but much better random read/write performance - the biggest weakness of non-Intel SSDS - than the Indilinx drives.

The best news here is that Corsair is pricing their drives more aggressively which should force OCZ and maybe even Intel to cut their prices in response. Intel's drives still perform the best overall, but Corsair has been pushing a 50% larger capacity at the same price points with their P128 against Intel's 80GB X25-M at ~$300.