News - Corsair introduces Performance SSDs with 256GB P256

[HEXUS]

Stonking read and write speeds make for a mighty tasty drive.

Read more.

[Fraz]

Does Native Command Queuing even make sense on an SSD?! Surely it's a rotating storage optimisation?

[[GSV]Trig]

Can I please have it when your done testing it?

[Singh400]

What controller does this use?

[Blackmage]

Does Native Command Queuing even make sense on an SSD?! Surely it's a rotating storage optimisation?

Good question! it seems like marketing

[superscaper]

Does Native Command Queuing even make sense on an SSD?! Surely it's a rotating storage optimisation?

That's one implementation of NCQ but in general it's about giving the controller/or drive something to do while the rest of the drive is otherwise busy, i.e. optimising the order of read/writes. It's not specific to hard disk drive heads. In a hard drive it's the drive head that's the bottleneck and needs optimising, whereas in a SSD it's the controller that's the bottleneck.

[Gareth - ASUS]

It's a Samsung controller.

The idea behind NCQ with SSDs is to allow the controller to cue up/prefetch commands while it's waiting for the system to process what's already been sent. So it's more about making efficient use of the SSD's ability to rapidly access data.

/edit superscaper beat me to it

[Fraz]

What controller does this use?

It says in the article - it's the Samsung one. Not quite as good as the Intel one, but way better than the joke that is the JMicron controller.

[Fraz]

It's a Samsung controller.

The idea behind NCQ with SSDs is to allow the controller to cue up/prefetch commands while it's waiting for the system to process what's already been sent. So it's more about making efficient use of the SSD's ability to rapidly access data.

/edit superscaper beat me to it

Cool - guess that makes sense.

[Singh400]

It's a Samsung controller.

It says in the article - it's the Samsung one. Not quite as good as the Intel one, but way better than the joke that is the JMicron controller.

That'll learn me won't it I'll read the article next time I promise

[scruffy]

Yay for performance, but do we really need another £600 SSD? Should manufacturers be concentrating on getting the costs down so SSD can become the mainstream...?

[TooNice]

I am wondering how this compares to the Vertex. It's hard to work out exactly how much this drive will cost in the UK, but I'd imagine that it's not too different, but assuming it's somewhere around £600-700, then it's pretty much where the 250GB Vertex is placed at.

If we were to only look at the transfer speed, this drive trumps it, but there is far more to performance than mere transfer speed.

[this_is_gav]

Yay for performance, but do we really need another £600 SSD? Should manufacturers be concentrating on getting the costs down so SSD can become the mainstream...?

Prices are getting there in the main part. SSDs are sat in many of the netbooks going around for pennies. OK, they're awful SSDs in my experience, far worse than hard drives, but the priceerformance ratio is getting there.

You didn't see Raptors or SCSI drives going cheap, did you? If people want insane performance they'll normally pay for it. For the enterprises where the truly insane performance is needed it will pay them back soon enough.

I wonder when we'll see overclockable SSDs.