Reviews - Corsair P256 256GB Solid State Drive: designed for performance junkies

[HEXUS]

High on capacity and performance, we examine the Corsair P256's credentials as a premium SSD.

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[Tunnah]

considering the size of the drives physically and the price difference between 128gb and 256gb, not to mention the lack of cooling needed to run them, i'd much rather have 2 of the 128gb sized ones RAID'ed for a helluva lot cheaper (£366 vs £551) plus the benefit of even better speeds!
edit: Just read that the speeds aren't as good. Maybe so but i reckon 2 in RAID would be very close to the P256 stats..hmm maybe a review for another day ?

excellent review btw, but a description of what the tools do would maybe make the benchmarks more informative; I had to google the tools used to see what they did (even though all i do is look over the graphs to see which is higher/lower regardless )

[borandi]

I was looking at the prices of the 128GB versions, because they look quite tasty, but having seen the performance, I might revert back to the Samsung I was looking at. Cant wait for SSDs to become a better price, like £1/GB...

[funke_munke]

Is there any word on them making a 128gb version of this drive with the same performance? I'd genuinely be interested in taking the plunge then, but £500-odd quid is just menthol.

[chrestomanci]

You said in the introduction, that the performance of SSD drives degrades as they fill up, and accumulate deleted files, and then you did all your tests on a freshly cleaned empty drive. Hardy real world conditions.

For comparison, can we have some benchmarks where you have filled the drive to the brim with lots of files (of all sorts of sizes), and then deleted just enough for the benchmark to run.

Also, we know from the reviews of older JMicron drives that they occasionally had a problem with appending to log files and the like, causing your whole application to stall. Perhaps a benchmark like this would be helpful

open LOGFILE
for 1 ... 100000
{
    time_benchmark {
        print LOGFILE "some message"
        fsync
    }
    sleep 1
}

And then do a frequency plot on how long those log file writes take, paying particular attention to the slowest 10%. A drive with badly written firmware for moving data around when small writes are needed would really suffer in this scenario.

The other thing, is I wish there was a sensible way to move all the block erase and wear leveling stuff up to the operating system. Linux has a number of filesystems specifically designed for raw flash memory ( jffs and ubifs are the best known ), but as far as I know, no flash drive exposed a raw interface to the flash, that would allow such a flash filing system to be used, and I don't think Microsoft is even developing a flash specific filing system.

At present most people will only see flash specific filing systems used on the internal PCI card flash memory used on Linux netbooks.

[aceuk]

Is there any word on them making a 128gb version of this drive with the same performance?

Corsair don't currently make a 128GB version of this drive, but several websites are listing the 128GB Samsung PB22-J (which is what the Corsair P256 is based on) for around £260. I was a bit surprised by this since this is meant to be OEM only. Perhaps Samsung changed their minds?