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Even though solid state drives have come down significantly in price over the past year, cache drives are still quite popular with those who want to enjoy the performance gains an SSD has to offer, without a large expense. They can also be added to existing mechanical hard drive systems to boost performance.
Today we are going to take a belated look at the Corsair Accelerator SSD in both 30 GB and 60 GB capacities. We will be comparing them in our tests to a single mechanical hard drive and a single solid state drive to give you an idea of how their performance compares.
These drives use custom software which has an advantage over Intel's Smart Response Technology as they can be used with pretty much any platform, rather than being restricted to Z68 and Z77.
Specifications
The Corsair Accelerator is supplied in a thin cardboard packet that contains a small plastic tray to protect the drive within. The front of the box features a large image of the drive alongside some basic information.
Corsair have chosen to use an attractive black and yellow livery for the packaging which is sure to make it stand out on the retail shelves. Turning the box over reveals some more information about the product in a couple of different languages.
Inside the packet, there are a few items supplied alongside the product. These include a 3.5″ bay adapter and the screws required for installation, as well as a quick start guide.
Apart from the different product labels on each drive, the 30 GB and 60 GB Accelerator units are completely identical. Both features the same 2.5″ enclosure which is 9.5 mm thick.
Corsair have chosen to use black coloured metal exclusively in the construction of the SSDs casing. The black finish of the SSD should fit in aesthetically with most systems as the yellow details on the label are hardly noticeable.
Despite being made from metal, the drive casing is lightweight and it generally feels very well put together. The two halves of the casing are held together using clips which can make it quite difficult to get inside the casing.
We wouldn't recommend opening the casing anyway as it will void the warranty.
Inside the drive, we find a tiny PCB which only extends half the depth of the casing. This is secured to the bottom plate of the casing using three screws. For the 60 GB drive, we find four 8 GB Micron 29F64G08CBAAA chips on the top side of the SSD.
Turning the PCB over, we can see four further memory chips alongside the SandForce SF-2141TB1-SDC controller as the 30 GB model. The two drives feature 32 GB and 64 GB of physical memory, of which 30 GB and 60 GB is available to use. This number will be reduced further when the drive is formatted in Windows.
The slight difference in physical and usable memory can be attributed to over-provisioning which is used by the controller to extend the life of the drive.
For the 30 GB drive, there are two memory chips visible on the top side of the PCB alongside two empty spaces. These are also 8 GB Micron Branded modules and carry the same part number, 29F64G08CBAAA.
Turning over the PCB reveals two further 8 GB memory chips alongside the SandForce SF-2141TB1-SDC controller. This controller is a SATA-300 model designed to be used in low capacity SSDs such as the Accelerator models.
Setting up one of these Accelerator drives as a cache is very simple indeed. The quick start guide directs the user to Corsair's website to download the software which takes less than five minutes to install. After rebooting the system, the cache drive is fully functional.
The setup procedure is much simpler than setting up Intel's Smart Response technology although there isn't any reason why you couldn't use Intel's software rather than Corsair's with these drives.
It's worth noting that the Corsair Accelerator drives are compatible with all platforms unlike SRT which is restricted to Intel's Z68 and Z77 platforms. This means these drives are ideal to use with an AMD system.
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.
Cache drives only store the information you access regularly so they take more than a single run of a program or benchmark to show performance increases. We will therefore be showing the performance after three runs.
Test System:
- Processor: Intel Core i7 3770K
- Motherboard: ASRock Z77 Extreme6
- Memory: 8 GB Kingston HyperX Genesis 1866 MHz
- CPU Cooler: Cooler Master TPC 800
- Graphics card: Radeon HD 6950
- Power supply: Corsair GS800
- OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
Comparison Drives
- 240 GB Intel 520 Series
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 with 30 GB Corsair Accelerator cache
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 with 60 GB Corsair Accelerator cache
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001
Software used:
- ATTO
- CrystalDiskMark
- PCMark 7
- Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
- Custom .BAT files
- Grand Theft Auto 4: Episodes from Liberty City
In our tests, we used our Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 as the OS drive while using the 30 GB and 60 GB Corsair Accelerator drives as a cache. These cache drives are only able to cache a maximum drive size of 2 TB so we reformatted the OS drive accordingly.
ATTO Disk Benchmark is a performance measurement tool 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.
In this test we see a significant boost in performance with the cache drives enabled. In fact, this is pretty the best possible performance we could expect due to the limitations of the SATA-300 interface of the drives.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using V3.0.1 x64 for testing today.
Once again, we see a significant boost in performance with the cache enabled.
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. We used the system storage suite for testing.
In this test we can see how the addition of the cache drives boosts real world performance as PCMark uses a series of real world tests.
The performance benefits of cache drives aren't always obvious when looking at synthetic benchmarks alone so it's important to conduct some real world tests. We measured the time taken from the system posting to desktop with a stopwatch.
We see impressive reductions in the time taken for the system to boot with the cache drives enabled. This is one of the most noticeable performance improvements with cache drives.
Cache drives are also effective at boosting program loading times. We devised a custom .BAT file to launch a number of programs and files simultaneously as it's very difficult to measure the time taken to load a single program with accuracy.
This .BAT file is configured to launch Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook as well as adobe Reader and the Windows Calculator. It was also configured to load up a series of files which are detailed in the screenshot below.
Where multiple runs of the test were required, we restarted the system between runs so that no information remained loaded in the RAM. Once again, we used a stopwatch to record the time taken to complete the test.
Again, we see impressive performance improvements in this test with the cache drives enabled. Bear in mind that these performance improvements will only be noticeable with programs you use often.
Our final real world test involved loading up Grand Theft Auto 4 Episodes from Liberty City. We measured the time taken between executing the game and it reaching the main screen using a stopwatch.
The cache drives fell a little further behind the SSD in this test but still showed a decent improvement over the hard drive alone.
We are quite impressed with what the Corsair Accelerator cache drives have to offer. In our tests, we saw significant improvements in performance with the cache drives enabled compared to the hard drive alone. In some cases, the performance was very close to that of a dedicated SSD.
One of the major selling points of these drives is the custom software which removes the need for Intel's Smart Response Technology. This means that the drives can be used with all chipsets, providing the system has Windows 7 installed. There is a statement on the Corsair website which says that Windows 8 software will be available at some point in the near future for those who have upgraded.
There are three different capacities available in the Accelerator series, 30 GB, 45 GB and 60 GB. We tested the 30 GB and 60 GB variants which are available for £40 from Dabs and £53 from Scan respectively. At these prices, we feel that the 30GB version is a good option for those looking to upgrade the performance of their system on a very budget.
We don't feel that the 60 GB is such a good option, though. We would rather purchase a 60 GB SATA-600 drive at a similar price and use it as a dedicated boot drive. Storage capacity would be limited but it could be combined with a hard drive for added storage. This option would offer more consistent performance.
Pros:
- Boost hard drive speeds significantly.
- 30 GB offers good value.
- Compatible with all chipsets.
- Easy to set up.
Cons
- 60 GB doesn't make sense as a cache drive.
- Dedicated SSDs offer more consistent performance.
KitGuru says: We think that the 30 GB drive is a great way of boosting your system's performance without spending very much money.
Nice idea, but the price drops have killed cache drives IMO.
I still dont have an SSD in my main system, im embarassed to say