Corsair Launching Reactor and Nova Series Solid-State Drives

With ever more powerful SSDs launching at ever higher prices it is important to not forget about the cost-conscious crowd. Toward that effort Corsair is launching two new series of SSDs to add to their current SSD lineup that mostly features Samsung controllers.

The Reactor series targets the value segment and features the revised JMF612 JMicron controller and is packing a whopping 128MB of on-board cache for smoother performance. The Nova series is the next higher offering and features the well-respected Indilinx Barefoot controller, the same one found in the Vertex series of SSDs from OCZ, and includes 64MB of cache memory.

The 120GB Reactor advertises speeds of up to 250MB/s read and 170MB/s writes, while the 60GB Reactor SSD advertises slightly slower 110 MB/s writes. This is opposed to the Nova series, with the 128GB Nova Series SSD able to achieve speeds of up to 270MB/s read and 190MB/s writes, while the 64GB Nova SSD offers 130MB/s writes. Suffice to say we have a bit more confidence in the Indilinx-based Nova SSD performance. Still, both drives will feature Windows 7 TRIM support, which means drive performance should remain consistent even as it’s filled.

Corsair has not released official prices to us but current vendors seem to be pricing these drives around the $3/per GB mark, and we expect these prices to decrease slightly as the supply of these drives builds up. This compares favorably to the expected $4/per GB of the 128GB Crucial RealSSD C300 and the $4/per GB of the 100GB Vertex LE featuring the Sandforce SF-1500 controller.

Corsair, a worldwide leader in high-performance computer and flash memory products, today announced the addition of the Reactor Series and Nova Series to its family of solid-state drives (SSDs). Both the Nova Series and Reactor Series provide the performance benefits of solid-state technology at an attractive cost per gigabyte.