Respected and established memory manufacturer Corsair has chosen to wait and watch where the emerging SSD market is heading. It has chosen to do so even though it is technically very close to this market and it would have seemed like a very natural way of expanding its product lineup. It has now finally decided to enter the market with the S128 model. As the name implies it is harddrive with 128 GB capacity, but read and write speeds at only 90MB/s and 70MB/s respectively. This may sound low, but Corsair claims that its SSD is still superior, thanks to its memory controller.
This is because most of the competing products use the JMicron602 memory controller, while Corsair has used a controller and NAND flash chips from Samsung. The reason for this is that JMicron602 has known issues with handling fast writes of small files, which is what a system drive is supposed to be good at. The root of the problem is often said being how the operating system handles Solid State Drives and optimizations have resulted in decent improvements, but just like Intel Corsair has developed a solution that works around this problem.
Corsair claims that its first contribution to the SSD segment has low theoretic read and write rates it will still deliver superior performance in real life use.
Whether this is correct or not is something we hope to find out within the the near future when the first reviews appear. Keep an eye out for Corsair’s new drives as it is expected to appear in stores soon, cost around $400.
It’s not often we see manufacturers dare to go their own way like this, because like with most markets it is the specifications that sells, but then again this is far from always reflected by how it actually performs. We hope that Corsair’s venture will fan out and that perhaps more companies will go down the same path in that case.
