News - Corsair goes on SSD offensive, launches Reactor and Nova series drives

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Two new product ranges, four new solid-state drives offering speeds of up to 250MB/s.

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Read more.

They are still too expensive in per GB cost to appeal to me. Much too expensive. Until that changes, the performance boost isn't worth the cost to me.

I think we will see the prices come down when the performance delta be similar across all units.

SSD is still in innovation stage - I've one system left which needs migrating to SSD but that can wait until I've a large 250GB+ drive...

I suspect you're right, prices will come down. It's pretty clear that the technology is here to stay and is only likely to go from strength to strength. Both because of marketing reasons (early adopter price premiums) and manufacturing (economies of scale from large scale manufacturing) it's a safe bet prices will come down... subject to exchange rate considerations, of course. But how widely adopted they get, and how fast it happens, will depend on price. Right now, I look at price, and I look at capacity, and I look at the extent of the performance gain and my conclusion is that the value for money is poor. So whether an individual will buy in or not depends on how they perceive the (relatively modest) real world difference they make, and how they value it. Differences in benchmark timings on something like this, to me, mean nothing. What does mean something is the difference to my actual computer usage, and while the gain is noticeable, it's nowhere near enough for me to pay the price premium.

So, right now, they'll be popular with the tech community, largely because they're the latest 'must-have', and they may resonate with those after low portable power consumption or shock resistance, but I don't see them hitting the mass market. To do that, they need to be a proper drive replacement, not a performance enhancing addition. When we get a single SSD large enough to be an alternative to having an HDD at all, and we get it at a price that's marketable to Joe Public, then we'll have hit critical mass. Until then, they're a niche product for techies and the well-heeled, especially when the larger ones cost as much or more than many people pay for the whole PC.

Bah - They still haven't got out the TRIM update for the X-Series. Never ever believe anyone who says it will be included in an upcoming release. Check out their forums - no release date and threads that are negative get killed.

:mad:

The price of SSDs is dropping rapidly, this time last year how much would you pay for one of these babies.... about 4-5 times what they cost now. They are still to pricey for me, my buying in point is likely to be around 80p per GB, looking at getting probably a 128GB or there abouts disk for around £100, and hopefully by Q4 this year they will be touching that.

£100 would be the magic price point for me too.
But would be looking for 150Gb or so at least.

I'll be rebuilding my rig around April time and was thinking of getting an SSD drive to boost the speed.

Everything else in the rig is fine - X6800 extreme edition, 6GB RAM, but the big ol' RAID 5 array rattles around in there, so if I move the OS onto an SSD I think I'd see a big boost.

But, like cordas, I'd be looking for 80p/GB, which I'm not likely to get.

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Originally Posted by cordas

The price of SSDs is dropping rapidly, this time last year how much would you pay for one of these babies.... about 4-5 times what they cost now. They are still to pricey for me, my buying in point is likely to be around 80p per GB, looking at getting probably a 128GB or there abouts disk for around £100, and hopefully by Q4 this year they will be touching that.

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I wish the price was dropping... I bought a Crucial M225 128GB a few months ago for £205. I want another one but now prices are nearer to £300. Its a supply and demand thing I guess, I am waiting until the prices really do start dropping here in the UK. Prices of sub £2 per GB would tempt me, but for it to be something I would buy without a lot of consideration I think prices need to get closer to the £1 per GB mark.

BTW love my Crucial M225, no slowdown to speak of yet, and its super quick :). Just updated firmware to support trim in windows 7 and the update process was perfect. Didn't even need to use my Arconis backup image as the data was all untouched by the update.

nearly there.............

i will suffer a minimum of 128GB at a maximum of £250, and for that kind of money i expect EXTREME performance!

which of the two would you guys recommend for a gamer? my instinct leans towards highest read speed, which is in fact the cheaper model, but i want to know what the controller chip is first.......

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Originally Posted by chrislmc

I wish the price was dropping... ..... Its a supply and demand thing I guess, ....

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To some extent it may be suply and demand. But a large chunk of that will be exchange rates between pound and dollar, and/or pound and euro, depending on the route taken in the supply chain.

Still quite out of my price range at the moment.

If I was to spend £300 on storage at this moment in time, I'd probably get a fair few 1Tb - 1.5Tb Drives and run then as a RAID5 array so I get the benefit of storage while still getting a bit of a performance increase :)

I have found a benchmark for the 60Gb Reactor. Doesn't look great...

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?p=439538

This drive might look good on paper, but we need more information about it to make an informed decision on whether to purchase it.

The prices should come down soon due to economies of scale and it should be easier to make than a spinning HDD.