this is it guys Corsair is 100% serious about the SSD game for the first time
they have an exclusive unique controller
design that they are shipping in their new Neutron and neutron GTX Line
Products so we've got the neutron GTX here today this is the 240 gig capacity
drive so much like San Forest drives corsera is setting aside about 133% of
theal total flash capacity for spare area which allows the drive to remain um
keep the performance higher over time as it fills up with data as well as just
generally behave more more smoothly um it also gives it a little bit of extra
so when cells eventually and guys there's no avoiding this the cells do
eventually die then it can use some of the spare area to compensate for that
over time if you keep your drive for a very long time so we have the 240 gig
drive this is using a totally new totally custom controller so let's go
ahead and get this opened up and have a look they've got a great package here
Corsair is so good at packaging like shiny red SATA 3 7 mm height don't worry
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
got let's see a warranty against defects
cool notification for Australian customers I must have gotten like an
international Temple or something okay uh we've got one of those 2 and 1/2 in
to 3 and 1/2 in adapters we've got screws for screwing into you
know things such as your system or the
adapter okay there two sets of screws
small ones for this big ones for this now let's get into the drive itself so
this is using a link AIA LM 87800
controller it is a dual core controller dual ARM cores actually with uh 256 Megs
of fairly fast uh fairly fast cach memory or uh yeah just a
sec sorry guys brain fart I was looking for ddr2 800 cach memory um which is
pretty fast compared to some of the other stuff out there I mean crucial is using DDR3 but it's actually clocked
slower so yeah okay so let's talk about
what is how this how this came to be so
Corsair has entered into an agreement with link a media where they are
actually collaborating and working together on this controller architecture
on this drive to the point where even both of them are doing quality control
because I know for a lot of consumers who have
bought ssds early on in their lifespans
in the past they've been burned with things like firmware issues or things
like um even data corruption I mean even Intel hasn't been free from this um
Micron crucial had a had a firmware bug
that caused the drives to just stop working after a set amount of time being
powered on which they then fixed with a firmware update however both link a
media and Corsair are doing extensive validation with this drive and the
firmware update process is extremely easy and Corsair is estimating anywhere
from about 3 days to issue a fix for any kind of firmware bugs that they find and
then from there two weeks to determine if it breaks anything that was that
wasn't broken by applying the fix so overall I'm expecting good things I
think Corsair is uh I mean I think we all know that Corsair is pretty much AOK
when it comes to supporting their products so I'm very excited to see how
this shapes up over time because as much as the performance is great now this is
a sta 3 Drive does support trim uh maintains reasonable performance over
time even if you hammer it really hard and performs right up there with really
high performance drives like the Intel 520 the Vertex 4 as well as the plexor
M3 Pro even beating them in many cases I'm really excited to see what is yet to
come from this architecture because remember it took Intel to really squeeze
the most out of the sandforce uh SATA 3 controller
so that took what six months a year
something like that so Corsair and Link a media have a lot of time to work on
this and potentially squeeze even more out of it and the Flash isn't going to
be a bottleneck particularly on the GTX Drive the GTX Drive uses toggle man
which is the fastest stuff out there right now and I think that's pretty much it
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
I'm actually going to go snag another drive just so so that I can put them
next to each other here and compare for you so what that means is that some of
the smaller notebooks or Ultra books these days that are using 2 and 1/2 in
drives are lower profile than a standard
drive so you can see here there's a 2mm difference between a 9M drive and a 7M
Drive Corsair has done this in order to enable compatibility no matter what kind
of a device you are installing the drive in so with the included adapter you can
install it in a 3 and 1/2 in Bay a normal 2 and 1/2 in Bay using the
mounting screws on the bottom or the mounting screws on the side or even a
slim 2 and 1/2 in Bay due to the low profile design of the drive the SATA 3
chipset of the SATA 3 uh connectors are at the back of the drive exactly where
you'd expect them to be and other than that I guess All That Remains now is uh
waiting for the ncx tech tips SSD update where we feature this guy and tell you a
little bit about the performance