Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB SSD Review
Introduction and Technical Specifications
Published: 14th September 2012 | Source: Corsair | Price: £198.23 |
Introduction
Such is the market saturation and high speeds available from the many SandForce equipped solid state drives, it's a confident company indeed who chooses to bring a new controller to the table and place it into a flagship model.
However, Corsair have never been a company to back down from a challenge, and so today we're looking at their latest drive, the Neutron GTX, equipped with a Link_A_Media Devices (hereafter LAMD) LM87800 controller. So what are the main benefits of this?
Firstly the big thrust with the LAMD is the multi-tasking design ethos. Although for most of us raw speed is the key ingredient, it's a drives ability to handle multiple input and output operations (IOPS) that mean you can work with a multitude of files and still, hopefully, get excellent performance.
Secondly the LAMD maintains its throughput without resorting to compression. Many controllers compress your data 'on the fly' to enable it to reach the highest speeds, but this obviously creates problems when you're transferring already compressed media. The LM87800 doesn't utilise compression and so you should see high performance regardless of the file type you're working with.
Finally the LM87800 has a raft of inbuilt management technologies to keep the drive performing at its peak for far longer than comparable controllers. These include the all important wear levelling, garbage collection and TRIM support. Today's GTX model also contains 'Adaptive DSP' which allows the controller to determine the optimum performance levels of the NAND with a minimal amount of queries, which should greatly extend the life of the NAND, and the speed of the drive.
Of course, most of these long-term benefits wont be visible in the short time we have available to test, so we'll concentrate mainly upon the speed.
Technical Specifications
| Model | CSSD-N240GBGTX |
| Controller | Link_A_Media Devices LM87800 |
| Flash Memory | Toshiba Toggle-Mode NAND |
| Interface | SATA III 6Gb/s |
| Operating Temperature | 0° to 70°C |
| Operating Humidity | 10% to 90% |
| Max Operating Altitude | 40000ft |
| MTBF | 2 million hours |
Most Recent Comments
Personaly I still think ssd's are to expensive for the size, I'd like to see 250g below £100 b4 I'd consider buying 1
Any thoughts, Tom?
(Also, I can't thank you enough for all the review vids - they've been extremely helpful while I've been gathering parts for my first PC build.)
But I've a doubt in my mind over the reliability of new LM87800 controller.
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Originally Posted by Greenback
just out of curiosity in your review you say you don't care about ocz is there any particular reason why?
Personaly I still think ssd's are to expensive for the size, I'd like to see 250g below £100 b4 I'd consider buying 1 |
The new vertex 4 with indilinx controler might be a diferent story, but about previous versions I wont recomend anyone to get them. I really regret have bought mine since I had some issues(and still do sometimes) of sistem frozing, etc. I had to turn OS HDD plug and play to be able to be stable.
Next time I get an SSD is gona be corsair or Intel for sure.
SATA 6? AHCI or IDE?
Could just be a faulty unit I support - or maybe even a dodgey sata cable?
Id put money on the fact you are using a 2011 board.
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Originally Posted by tinytomlogan
^^^Be config problem, IE: user/driver related issues.
Id put money on the fact you are using a 2011 board. |
I have used a new SATA cable, different SATA port and even try a secure clean as advised by corsair posts.
Maybe the SATA controller on older motherboards dont play game with these new drives.
But yeh, your motherboard will be why.
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Originally Posted by tinytomlogan
Be the drivers no doubt.
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I have just added the as a boot drive and have just installed windows 7 onto it. Obviously a clean install. I am experiencing crashing and freezing.
I am coming from the Force 3 120gb so I know how a SSD behaves with windows and this is the first time I have ever seen the spinning loading symbol on the taskbar during startup.
What should I do?
EDIT: I just updated the bios on the mobo and it improved drastically but it still lags, horribly, Programs like chrome which work smoothly on any system just keep freezing.
EDIT2: I should mention that its lags for a bit, then it works, then lags, then works. It just goes in a cycle. However, this is not okay for any SSD, this is supposed to be one of the best.
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Originally Posted by CPMFW
i´d love to swap my force gt for a neutron gtx
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CSS Valid
The first SSD equipped with the LM87800 controller appears in our offices. How does it perform?
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