Corsair Neutron 240GB and Neutron GTX 240GB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. Corsair Neutron 240GB3. Corsair Neutron 240GB (Super High Res Gallery)4. Neutron GTX 240GB5. Neutron GTX 240GB (Super High Res Gallery)6. Testing Methodology7. CrystalDiskMark8. ATTO Disk Benchmark9. AS SSD10. PCMark 711. IOMeter12. Real World Testing13. Closing Thoughts14. View All Pages

Today we are looking at the latest Solid State Drives from Corsair – the Neutron and Neutron GTX, in 240GB capacities. Both of these drives are using the latest Link A Media (LAMD) controller which is 6Gbps capable and is said to deliver stunning performance when tasked with both compressible and incompressible data. Can Corsair claim the top performance spot with these new drives?

There is no doubt that the Solid State market right now is cut-throat. Kingston have recently axed the price of their drives across several promotional campaigns in the United Kingdom and competitors have adopted similar policies. All in all, this is a great situation for the consumer as the deals are currently very tempting.

Corsair have experienced a high level of success in the solid state sector so far, even though they hit a few bumps with the Sandforce controller along the way. I will admit that I am becoming rather weary of reviewing Solid State Drives which use the Sandforce 2281 controller, therefore Corsair's adoption of the Link A Media controller is both fascinating and exciting.

The Corsair Neutron drives adopt the LM87800, an eight channel 6Gbps capable controller. This controller utilises dedicated host side and NAND-side ARM microcontrollers. It also supports IMFT ONFI 2.0 Synchronous NAND.

Corsair have released two series, which you can see above. The blue coloured box is the plain Neutron which is available in 120GB and 240GB capacities. The red coloured box is the Neutron ‘GTX' which almost sounds as if Nvidia have had input. The GTX version is faster, available in 120GB /240GB capacities and slightly more expensive, as we would expect.

Currently Overclockers UK are stocking both versions of the Neutron. The 120GB Neutron costs £89.99 inc vat, and the 240GB Neutron is £169.99 inc vat. The 120GB Neutron GTX costs £113.99 inc vat and the 240GB Neutron GTX is £199.99 inc vat. All of these drives have a five year warranty which is reassuring.

As this might be confusing, let us have a look at the market positioning and rated speed characteristics of the four drives.

The 120GB Neutron is listed by Corsair as 555 MB/s read and 211 MB/s write. The 240GB Neutron delivers faster write speeds, listed at 555 MB/s read and 370 MB/s write. The 120GB Neutron GTX is listed at 555 MB/s read and 330 MB/s write. The 240GB Neutron GTX is the fastest drive of them all, listed at 555 MB/s read and 511 MB/s write. Random IOPS write performance is also impressive, rated by the company between 86,000 and 90,000, depending on the drive. We will look at this later in the review.

The Neutron 240GB box is beautifully designed with sophisticated use of typography.

The bundle includes a handy 3.5 inch drive bay, a very useful addition. They also include mounting screws for the system build.

The Neutron 240GB Solid State drive ships in a slim 7mm form factor metal chassis, offering full compatiblity with the latest slim ultrabook laptops. The PCB is bolted to the chassis via three screws.

The Neutron 240GB uses the LAMD LM87800 controller and there are two modules of Samsung DDR2 800 128MB DRAM cache, for 256MB total. This Neutron drive uses 16x16GB of Micron 25nm synchronous memory. The 16 modules are split across both sides of the PCB.

When the drive is formatted in Windows 7 there is a total of 224GB free.

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.

The GTX packaging is very similar to the vanilla Neutron box. The ‘GTX' naming is highlighted on the front of the box and the colouring has shifted from blue to red.

The Neutron GTX 240GB Solid State drive ships in a slim 7mm form factor metal chassis, offering full compatiblity with the latest slim ultrabook laptops.

Opening the chassis is straightforward, a flat head screwdriver can be used to pry open the case. The PCB is bolted to the chassis via three screws.

The Neutron 240GB GTX uses the LAMD LM87800 controller and there are two modules of Samsung DDR2 800 128MB DRAM cache, for 256MB total. This Neutron GTX drive uses 8x32GB modules of Toshiba Toggle Mode 24nm NAND flash memory. The rear of the GTX PCB has no memory – only the Samsung cache module. All 8 chips are positioned on one side.

When the drive is formatted in Windows 7 there is a total of 224GB free.

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 2700k
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 2700k system above):
Visiontek Racer Series 120GB
Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 120GB
Mushkin Chronos 240GB
Kingston HyperX 3k 120GB
OCZ Vertex 4 512GB
OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSD Review (firmware 1.4 update)
Transcend SSD720 128GB
Kingston SSDNow V+200 90GB
OCZ Octane 512GB (V1.13 fw)
Mach Xtreme MX-DS Turbo 120GB
Corsair Performance Pro 256GB
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
Corsair F100 100GB
Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB
MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB

PCMark 7 system:
Processor: Core i7 3960 X Extreme Edition @ 4.4ghz
Cooler: Antec 920 H20
Memory: 16GB G.Skill 2,400mhz @ 10-11-10-30
Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme
Power Supply: Enermax Platimax 1200W
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Lian Li PC-A77FR Aluminium Red Full Tower Case

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.

Overall performance is certainly impressive, especially when we factor in that the default test deals with incompressible data. Both drives deliver good results, although the GTX is stronger overall with write performance.

We switch to 0x00 mode, which deals with compressible data. Much like the OCZ Indilinx Everest 2 controller, these results are impressively strong in both modes.

Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed 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.

Both drives score well in ATTO, although the standard Neutron 240GB is considerably behind the Sandforce 2281 powered drives in this strictly compressible bandwidth test.

The Neutron GTX 240GB fares better, delivering a 557 MB/s read and 505 MB/s write score. This is due to the higher cost Toshiba Toggle Mode 24nm NAND flash memory Corsair have incorporated into this drive.

Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today.

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.

We can see the strength of the Corsair Neutron 240GB drives when dealing with incompressible data, as they are only outperformed by the Vertex 4 512GB in our chart above. Class leading results.

Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which 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 shows only a very tiny difference between the drives, in favour of the Neutron GTX. That said, both scores are very healthy.

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 test with both 4k random read and 4k random write, as shown above.

IOPS performance is outstanding, scoring well over 80,000 IOPS in both of our 4k random and 4k read tests. These are some of the best results yet from a mainstream enthusiast drive.

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.

Both drives score 22 seconds in our boot test, which is exceptionally good.

Very strong results from the STALKER level load, scoring 16 seconds, matching the class leading Vertex 4 drives from OCZ.

I have been exceptionally impressed with the latest Corsair Neutron Solid State Drives. Adopting the new LM87800 controller may have been considered as risky, but we feel it was a necessary move if Corsair wanted to stand out in market saturated with Sandforce 2281 powered drives.

The vanilla Corsair Neutron is a little slower than the GTX counterpart, but both versions are capable of delivering substantial bandwidth with sequential transfers, equally strong with incompressible and compressible data.

Regular readers will remember our review of the OCZ Vertex 4, which uses the Indilinx Everest 2 controller. Both Vertex 4 and Neutron solid state solutions are batting at class leading levels.

AS SSD results of close to 1000 points would verify the potency when forced to deal with pure incompressible data. This is a significantly stronger result than any Sandforce 2281 solution on the market.

Neutron IOPS performance is simply outstanding, capable of sustaining random 4k read/write levels between 83,000 and 86,000. These are some of the highest results we have recorded yet from a consumer level solid state solution and certainly a primary characteristic worth considering if you are contemplating a purchase.

The GTX version of the drive has stronger sequential write performance, due to the high grade Toshiba Toggle Mode 24nm NAND flash memory. Both drives however are phenomenal performers.

The Neutron and Neutron GTX are competitively priced in the United Kingdom, with Overclockers offering a week long deal at time of publication, dropping the price even further. The Neutron 240GB is available for £169.99 inc vat. The Neutron GTX 240GB is available for £199.99 inc vat.

Pros:

• Balanced high performance with incompressible and compressible data.
• class leading IOPS performance.
• slim line 7mm chassis.
• 5 year warranty.

Cons:

• Not the cheapest drives on the market.

Kitguru says: We weren't expecting OCZ's Vertex 4 to come under threat so soon, but the Neutron is a serious contender for top position.

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