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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?
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.
On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise
Monitor: Dell U2410
Other Drives (used in Core i7 2600k system above):
Samsung 830 Series 512GB
Patriot Pyro SE 240GB
Patriot Wildfire 240GB
MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD
Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB
Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD OCZ Agility 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB
ADATA S511 240GB
Intel 510 120GB
Corsair F100 100GB
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB
Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB
MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB
PCIe drives test system:
OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD &
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Test System:
CPU: Intel Core i7 990x @ 4.8ghz
Cooler: Corsair H100 Performance Liquid Cooler
Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Black Edition
Memory: 12GB Kingston DDR3 @ 1600mhz 9-9-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Nvidia GTX580
Chassis: Lian Li X2000F
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise
Monitor: Dell U2410
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
CrystalMark
AS SSD
PCMark 7
IOMeter
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.1 x64.
As we had hoped, the incompressible data performance is brilliant, outperforming the Sandforce 2281 powered drives in this specific test and placing the drive right at the top of the performance chart.
Sequential performance isn't quite as good as the 2281 drives, but it would be difficult to tell the difference in the real world.
As we do with all our SSD reviews, we enabled the ‘compressible' data mode, called ‘0x00'. Performance remains around the same level, highlighting that this controller delivers in both modes.
Above some compares with other leading drives released in recent months.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
Performance is solid, although with this sequential compressible test, the Marvell powered Performance Pro lags behind the leading Sandforce 2281 powered solid state drives.
Above, comparison results from other leading drives currently available on the market.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
AS SSD works with incompressible data, which highlights the particular strengths of this Corsair Performance pro 256GB solid state drive. Interestingly, the Corsair drive scores more than the Samsung 830 Series 512GB which is also particularly strong with incompressible data.
Above, we have included some results from other solid state drives we have tested in recent months.
PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.
PCMARK 7 results are extremely impressive, especially in the ‘starting applications' test, outperforming the Samsung 830 Series 512GB drive.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.
We use a custom Kitguru configuration for 4k random write to measure performance.
There are many ways to measure IOPS performance. With our own configuration, the drive scores 36,472 IOPS.
It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.
Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.
Directly comparing the Performance Pro 256GB against the Samsung 830 Series 512GB is favourable for Corsair as this drive boots up around 1 second faster.
19 seconds is an identical result when compared against the Samsung 830 Series 512GB drive, a very impressive result indeed.
The Corsair Performance Pro 256GB SSD is an exceptionally fast drive which excels with incompressible data. The customised Marvell 9174 is a very impressive controller, able to deliver high levels of bandwidth with both incompressible and compressible data. It is reassuring to know that it doesn't matter the files you need moved … this controller simply won't compromise.
If you regularly need to transfer movies, photographs and music files, then incompressible data performance can make a difference. This is why the Samsung 830 Series 512GB drive, which we recently reviewed, makes such a great purchase. Some of the enthusiast audience are also concerned with overall Sandforce reliability too, which means that a variety of high performance alternatives are still very much in demand.
The Corsair Performance Pro 256GB is clearly faster than the Samsung 830 Series 512GB in the majority of our test results today, applications such as AS SSD clearly highlight the performance improvements.
The cherry on the cake is certainly the pricing – Scan are selling the drive for £318.30 inc vat, which means this is one of the most inexpensive 256GB solid state drives on the market today.
Pros:
- Balanced all round performance.
- Looks great.
- good bundle.
- Marvell controller has no reliability issues.
Cons:
- Not as fast as Sandforce with compressible sequential data.
Kitguru says: This is without doubt one of the most balanced high performance solid state drives.
