Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB SSD Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] It isn’t every day tech writers get surprised, but heads were certainly turned (including mine) when Corsair announced its 4th generation SSDs based upon the controller from some unknown controller company. Yet, apparently this “unknown” company has been producing and selling both disk and flash-based drives in the enterprise market for years, ever since its inception in 2004. The Neutron just happens to be the first consumer-focused SSD to feature a Link_A_Media Devices' chip housed inside. Reportedly, Corsair has signed an exclusive distribution agreement and will be the only company for the time-being to offer SSDs powered by a LAMD controller. The launch of the Neutron family utilizing an unheard-of controller was an especially bold move from Corsair, yet it is also welcome to see. Currently, SandForce SSDs are still by far the most prevalent type on the market and there simply are not many publicly-available controller alternatives that exist beyond Marvell and Samsung for performance SSDs. Even Intel has migrated to using SandForce in its main consumer SSDs. Despite this, Corsair has somehow managed to pull the metaphorical rabbit out of a hat, launching not just a completely new choice in SSDs, but a new premium offering that is capable of hanging with the best-performing SSDs currently on the market. This is no small feat. Corsair’s Neutron SSD family is comprised of the Neutron and Neutron GTX varieties. Both models feature the same LM87800 controller at the core, with the only difference being price and the choice of NAND flash housed inside. In addition to types like MLC and TLC, NAND typically is offered in asynchronous, synchronous, and toggle-based varieties with performance (and cost) increasing as one moves up the chain, with toggle-based NAND currently at the top. The Neutron makes use of Micron’s 25nm synchronous flash, while the GTX goes full bore with Toshiba’s 24nm toggle flash. Corsair Neutron GTX Series 120 GB 240 GB 480 GB Sequential Read 550 MB/s 555MB/s Sequential Write 330 MB/s 470 MB/s 511 MB/s Maximum Random Reads 80,000 IOPS 85,000 IOPS 90,000 IOPS Maximum Random Writes 90,000 IOPS 85,000 IOPS NAND 24nm Toshiba Toggle NAND Interface SATA 3.0 6Gbit/s Power Consumption 0.6W Idle / 4.6W Writes Price $119 $209 $454 Warranty 5 Years The model we are testing here is the 240GB Neutron GTX, although it’s worth highlighting that all models of the Neutron family feature a full five-year warranty. Both offer capacities of 120GB and 240GB, although only the GTX family includes a model up to 480GB. In line with recent trends, Corsair’s SSDs feature the thinner 7mm height that has become more popular over the traditional 9mm height for 2.5” form-factor drives. All models ship with a single-piece metal tray adapter for easy mounting in a standard 3.5” drive bay. Overall specifications look excellent for a high-performance SATA 3.0 solid-state drive, especially with that already mentioned essential five-year warranty. One cautionary note though would be the power numbers. We do not have the equipment to check for power consumption, but the reported 4.6W load number is on the high side. After some checking around, the actual idle power consumption is also on the higher range of the spectrum. That isn’t to say these drives are unusually power-hungry as there certainly are worse offenders out there, but it is worth pointing out that these drives will consume a little more power than a typical laptop hard drive. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate and real-world applicable as possible. We list most of the steps and processes involved in setting up and conducting our benchmarking process below, but in the interests of brevity we can't mention every last detail. If there is any pertinent information that we've inadvertently omitted or you have any thoughts, suggestions, or critiques, then please feel free to email us or post directly in our forums. This site exists for readers like you and we value your input. The table below lists the hardware used in our current storage-testing machine, which remains unchanged throughout all of our testing, with the obvious exception of the storage device. Each drive used for the sake of comparison is also listed here. Techgage Solid-State Drive Test System Processor Intel Core i7-2600 – 3.80GHz (Locked) Quad-Core Motherboard ASUS P8P67 Deluxe Memory 4GB Kingston DDR3-2133 Graphics AMD Radeon HD 5770 Storage Hitachi 7200RPM 2TB Hard DriveCorsair Neutron GTX 240GBCrucial m4 256GBKingston HyperX 3K 240GBKingston SSDNow V300 240GBOCZ Vector 256GBOCZ Vertex 4 256GB Power Supply Antec NeoHE 550W Cooling Noctua DH-14 Et cetera Dell 2407WFP (1920x1200)Lite-on DVD-RWWindows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit Our Windows 7 Desktop for SSD Testing When preparing our SSD testbed for benchmarking we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines The Core i7-2600 processor is turbo-locked at 3.5GHz for result consistency. No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's EFI. AHCI is enabled in the motherboard's EFI for best performance. Only the Intel 6Gb/s port controller is used for test drives. Only cold boots are utilized; for the purposes of our testing a boot is defined as the moment the power button is depressed to the moment the last systray icon and program has fully loaded after reaching the Windows 7 desktop. Auto-login is enabled. Windows 7 Optimizations User Account Control (UAC) is disabled. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Windows Update and OS power-saving settings are disabled. For our new Sandy Bridge storage testbed we have migrated to using test images for our drives. All drives are imaged with the cloned test image to ensure all drivers, programs, and settings remain identical for testing purposes. We feel disk cloning software and SSD controller technology has matured to the point where potential issues such as non-aligned sectors are no longer a potential issue. For testing, we run all tests five times dropping the highest and lowest results, then take the average of the middle three. And who said that college statistics class wouldn't prove useful? If any anomalous results are seen the test will be run again. Given the complexities of modern computers, and especially today's operating systems and the software that runs on them, we feel this provides the most accurate results possible. Finally, we are seeking to constantly improve and expand upon our SSD testing methodology. We are always actively seeking real-world workload scenarios that are bottlenecked by hard drives, so if you have any suggestions whatsoever or there is a program you would like to see included in our SSD content, then please drop by our forums and let us know! We are always looking to expand our SSD benchmarks and provide more useful and real-world results, and not just synthetic numbers. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: PCMark 7] Futuremark’s PCMark benchmarking suite should need no introduction; it has been a staple of PC benchmarks for the better half of a decade. It includes over 25 individual workloads designed to measure all aspects of system performance and gives individual scores in each test as well as an overall system performance score for easy system comparisons. PCMark 7 offers a more accurate measure of performance as compared to its predecessor, PCMark Vantage. The storage scoring metrics especially were significantly re-tuned and optimized with SSDs in mind to give a more balanced disk subsystem score. With PCMark 7, the Neutron GTX performs admirably, turning in an overall score that places it directly between both SandForce drives in our graphs. One thing is clear though, and that is the LAMD controller clearly has the capability to offer a level of performance that puts it in a league with the best SSDs currently on the market. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: Iometer] Originally developed by Intel - and since given to the open-source community - Iometer (pronounced “eyeawmeter”, like thermometer) is one of the best storage-testing applications available, for a couple of reasons. The first, and primary, is that it’s completely customizable, and if you have a specific workload you need to test a drive with, you can easily accomplish it here. Secondly, it bypasses the Windows disk subsystem entirely, meaning it bypasses the OS drivers and writes directly to the storage media. This has important implications, such as it means Windows 7 cannot correctly align Iometer to match the SSD or HDD sector alignment. We have updated our test suite to the latest stable 1.10 rc1 build of Iometer, which was released in December, 2010. This version makes some changes to be aware of; specifically, it gives the option for three types of data sets used during testing. 2006 and earlier versions used a pseudo-random dataset for testing, while the 1.10 build will default to a “repeating bytes” test pattern. A full random test mode was also added. To avoid giving SandForce drives an unfair advantage (they rely on data compression to achieve their performance), we will stick to the pseudo-random test pattern for all of our testing. We have configured Iometer for correct 4KB disk alignment using a single 8GB test file from within Windows, meaning they are acting as the host OS drive with no other drives in the system. We run individual random 4KB read and write tests at a queue depth of 3 and again at 32. Then we run the 128KB sequential read & write tests using a queue depth of 1. In addition, all drives are in a dirty state prior to testing - this means results will not be comparable to advertised manufacturer results. Our goal is to measure end-user performance under real-world conditions, and so our testing reflects typical SSD performance after it has been used for some length of time in a system. Each test pattern is run for 5 minutes to achieve an...

Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB SSD Review

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