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this is it guys Corsair is 100% serious about the SSD game for the first time

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they have an exclusive unique controller

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design that they are shipping in their new Neutron and neutron GTX Line

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Products so we've got the neutron GTX here today this is the 240 gig capacity

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drive so much like San Forest drives corsera is setting aside about 133% of

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theal total flash capacity for spare area which allows the drive to remain um

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keep the performance higher over time as it fills up with data as well as just

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generally behave more more smoothly um it also gives it a little bit of extra

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so when cells eventually and guys there's no avoiding this the cells do

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eventually die then it can use some of the spare area to compensate for that

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over time if you keep your drive for a very long time so we have the 240 gig

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drive this is using a totally new totally custom controller so let's go

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ahead and get this opened up and have a look they've got a great package here

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Corsair is so good at packaging like shiny red SATA 3 7 mm height don't worry

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I'll cover all this stuff in a moment I'm just trying to figure out how to get it open here so Inside the Box we've

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got let's see a warranty against defects

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cool notification for Australian customers I must have gotten like an

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international Temple or something okay uh we've got one of those 2 and 1/2 in

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to 3 and 1/2 in adapters we've got screws for screwing into you

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know things such as your system or the

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adapter okay there two sets of screws

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small ones for this big ones for this now let's get into the drive itself so

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this is using a link AIA LM 87800

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controller it is a dual core controller dual ARM cores actually with uh 256 Megs

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of fairly fast uh fairly fast cach memory or uh yeah just a

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sec sorry guys brain fart I was looking for ddr2 800 cach memory um which is

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pretty fast compared to some of the other stuff out there I mean crucial is using DDR3 but it's actually clocked

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slower so yeah okay so let's talk about

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what is how this how this came to be so

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Corsair has entered into an agreement with link a media where they are

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actually collaborating and working together on this controller architecture

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on this drive to the point where even both of them are doing quality control

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because I know for a lot of consumers who have

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bought ssds early on in their lifespans

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in the past they've been burned with things like firmware issues or things

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like um even data corruption I mean even Intel hasn't been free from this um

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Micron crucial had a had a firmware bug

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that caused the drives to just stop working after a set amount of time being

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powered on which they then fixed with a firmware update however both link a

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media and Corsair are doing extensive validation with this drive and the

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firmware update process is extremely easy and Corsair is estimating anywhere

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from about 3 days to issue a fix for any kind of firmware bugs that they find and

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then from there two weeks to determine if it breaks anything that was that

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wasn't broken by applying the fix so overall I'm expecting good things I

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think Corsair is uh I mean I think we all know that Corsair is pretty much AOK

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when it comes to supporting their products so I'm very excited to see how

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this shapes up over time because as much as the performance is great now this is

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a sta 3 Drive does support trim uh maintains reasonable performance over

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time even if you hammer it really hard and performs right up there with really

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high performance drives like the Intel 520 the Vertex 4 as well as the plexor

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M3 Pro even beating them in many cases I'm really excited to see what is yet to

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come from this architecture because remember it took Intel to really squeeze

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the most out of the sandforce uh SATA 3 controller

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so that took what six months a year

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something like that so Corsair and Link a media have a lot of time to work on

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this and potentially squeeze even more out of it and the Flash isn't going to

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be a bottleneck particularly on the GTX Drive the GTX Drive uses toggle man

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which is the fastest stuff out there right now and I think that's pretty much it

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yeah we've we've almost wrapped up so another cool thing about this drive is it uses a 7 mm low profile you know what

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I'm actually going to go snag another drive just so so that I can put them

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next to each other here and compare for you so what that means is that some of

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the smaller notebooks or Ultra books these days that are using 2 and 1/2 in

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drives are lower profile than a standard

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drive so you can see here there's a 2mm difference between a 9M drive and a 7M

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Drive Corsair has done this in order to enable compatibility no matter what kind

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of a device you are installing the drive in so with the included adapter you can

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install it in a 3 and 1/2 in Bay a normal 2 and 1/2 in Bay using the

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mounting screws on the bottom or the mounting screws on the side or even a

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slim 2 and 1/2 in Bay due to the low profile design of the drive the SATA 3

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chipset of the SATA 3 uh connectors are at the back of the drive exactly where

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you'd expect them to be and other than that I guess All That Remains now is uh

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waiting for the ncx tech tips SSD update where we feature this guy and tell you a

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little bit about the performance