News - Corsair extends line of solid state drives with high-end Extreme series

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Enthusiast-orientated Extreme Series SSDs launched in 128GB, 64GB and 32GB capacities.

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Read more.

Interesting, but why are the smaller driver always a bit slower? Is it inherent to the technology? I cant think of any reason myself. It means that the speed isn't that different to the Agility series or the PB22-J's, which is a shame. I guess I am still waiting to see what the 2nd generation Intel drives are like.

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Originally Posted by sayer

Interesting, but why are the smaller driver always a bit slower? Is it inherent to the technology? I cant think of any reason myself.

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Usually because the controller can talk to several banks of memory at the same time.

The numbers indicate that 220MB/s read and 135MB/s write is the speed of the memory, when you doublt up to 128MB you reach the limit of the controller which looks to be 240MB/s read and 170MB/s write.

Going by this, you could speculate that if the controller was faster, you could in theory hit 440MB/s and 270MB/s. This is just pure speculation, though I do believe there is an element of reality in there somewhere :)

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Originally Posted by sayer

Interesting, but why are the smaller driver always a bit slower? Is it inherent to the technology? I cant think of any reason myself. It means that the speed isn't that different to the Agility series or the PB22-J's, which is a shame. I guess I am still waiting to see what the 2nd generation Intel drives are like.

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It's all down to the chips - the smaller capacity drives have fewer chips (hence fewer channels), or the chips may be a previous generation (hence lower capacity per chip, plus slower performance).

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Originally Posted by Funkstar

Usually because the controller can talk to several banks of memory at the same time.

The numbers indicate that 220MB/s read and 135MB/s write is the speed of the memory, when you doublt up to 128MB you reach the limit of the controller which looks to be 240MB/s read and 170MB/s write.

Going by this, you could speculate that if the controller was faster, you could in theory hit 440MB/s and 270MB/s. This is just pure speculation, though I do believe there is an element of reality in there somewhere :)

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in theory yes, except for several key problems, if the data you are accessing is all from one bank/area then you run into trouble. Its kind of the opposite of platter based drives which have consistant speeds but faster at the beginning or edge of the disc, slower at end/centre of the platter. The issue with SSD's is you only get the max speed writing to all banks at the same time and same for reading. In all honesty I'm not sure how the writing patterns work within ssd's, if it tries to separate out the data as much as possible, but also how that is effected by the drive wear leveling algorithms which could very possible screw that up to a unknowable level.

Thats also assuming that say call it like ide channels on a mobo, think of hard drives like mem chips and the cables as a channel, are certain chips on certain channels only, I assume for simplicity and cheapness thats very likely. However if each chip individually is read/writable at any time then thats not such a problem but I would suspect the former method as it would require a simpler, cheaper controller, and pcb.

Shame.

This mean that the 'Performance' series is actually less good than the P series with the Samsung controller. These are basically the same as the OCZ Vertex: great at synthetic tests, used for publicity, but not that great in real world.

TheTechReport

Ah shame really, they looked promising at first.

I have a feeling I will stick with the OCZ Agility if I was to get one now (very tempted!). But I am going to try and hold out for the X25-m update. The Trim command is apparently supported as default in the Agility.

Anyone have any ideas if we are going to have to wipe these drives when updating the firmware?