Corsair Nova Series V128 128GB SSD

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] For long-time enthusiasts, Corsair's name still invokes pictures of memory modules or even perhaps a variety of indestructible flash drives. It wasn't until the company's highly successful foray into the power supply market that it began to be regarded as more than just a memory company. By offering from the start power supplies targeting that sweet spot of quality at an affordable price, the company quickly won over many consumers and seemingly changed its brand image overnight. Since then, Corsair has even launched a line of well-received quality enthusiast computer cases. As the SSD market began to expand and develop, the company saw the burgeoning opportunity and launched a variety of SSDs using controller technologies from several of the major industry players. As far as users are concerned there can never be enough competition in the SSD market, but not all solid-state drives that have been introduced are created anywhere near equal, either. The Corsair Nova series has nothing to worry about however, as it utilizes Indilinx's famous Barefoot controller which has already proven itself as one of the more venerable controllers on the market. If anything, the Nova series is remarkably similar to Corsair's previous flagship Extreme series of SSDs, with the only notable difference being a different choice of NAND venders (Micron NAND). This means the Nova series effectively supersedes the Extreme models that can still be found at various retailers. Corsair's Force series is the current flagship model and as the name implies it uses a SandForce controller along with a price to match. Instead the Nova series will ensure consumers have the option of last-years flagship model (and its performance) at a lower to mid-range price today, something we find quite agreeable given the solid, all-around excellent performance from the Indilinx Barefoot controller. To make it easier to discern the key differences between Corsar's SSD models we created a quick chart below using current street pricing from various online vendors. Curiously the Nova series receives higher throughput ratings than the Extreme series it replaces, likely due to firmware optimizations and the use of Micron instead of Samsung NAND. If you noticed something unusual about the pricing, we will address this in the conclusion. Series NAND Controller Read/Write Price Density (GBs) Warranty Performance MLC Samsung 2nd-Gen 220/180 MB/s $275 (AMIR) 64, 128, 256, 512 3 Years Force MLC SandForce SF-1200 285/275 MB/s $309 60, 100, 120, 200, 240 3 Years Reactor MLC JMicron JMF-612 250/170 MB/s $270 (AMIR) 60, 120 3 Years Nova MLC Indilinx Barefoot 270/195 MB/s $319 32, 64, 128, 256 3 Years Extreme MLC Indilinx Barefoot 240/170 MB/s $380 32, 64, 128, 256 3 Years Corsair utilizes a plastic tray to secure the SSD from possible shipping damage. Hidden inside the box was a familiar looking 2.5" to 3.5" solid-metal mounting tray that will securely mount the SSD into the majority of desktop 3.5" drive bays. This drive adapter is the simplest design we have seen and makes it very quick to mount or change SSDs as needed. Some notable features worth mentioning is the use of a 64MB DRAM cache, TRIM support if the operating system supports it, SMART, and NCQ capabilities. As with all Corsair SSDs the Nova series carries a full three year warranty. This warranty period is standard for the majority of both SSDs and HDDs alike. The Nova series drive uses a SATA 2 connection, but due to SATA 3's backwards compatibility any SATA 2 device may still be plugged into a SATA 3 port just as with USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=SSD & Packaging; 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. Component Techgage Hard Drive Test System Processor Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 - 2.4GHz Quad-Core Motherboard Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 Memory 4GB Corsair 800MHz CAS 4 Graphics Foxconn 8800 GTS 320MB Audio On-Board Audio Storage Corsair Nova V128 128GB Intel X25-M G1 80GB Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Kingston SSDNow V Series 128GB Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 128GB OCZ Summit 60GB OCZ Vertex Turbo 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 100GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256GB Power Supply PC Power & Cooling Quad Silencer 750W Cooling Arctic Freezer 7 Pro Et cetera Lite-on DVD-RW Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Our Windows 7 Desktop for SSD Testing When preparing our SSD testbed for testing we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS. AHCI is enabled in the motherboard's BIOS for best performance. HPET is configured to 64bit mode in the BIOS. 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. All solid-state drives start in a factory fresh or HDDErase fresh state prior to testing. Windows 7 is manually installed and then SYSmark 2007 Preview is installed. Due to the nature of SYSmark, Windows 7 must be reinstalled upon completion of testing in order for many programs to function normally and benchmark consistently. As not all SSDs support TRIM technology, this process is important and ensures all of the drives are in a "dirtied" state before we collect the benchmark results. For the time-being, cloned test images are not used as these can result in non-aligned partitions, which if it occurs will result in degraded SSD performance. Just as with Windows XP's default sector offset causing degraded SSD performance, non-intelligent cloning software can have the same effect. For testing, we ran all tests five times, dropping the highest and lowest results to finally average the middle three. And who said that college statistics class wouldn't prove useful? If any anomalous results were seen, the test was run again. Given the complexities of modern computers, and especially today's operating systems, 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 activity 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 Vantage] There are few PC enthusiasts who are unfamiliar with the name "Futuremark", as the Finland-based developer has been producing quality benchmarks to help us gauge our computer's worth for years. Originally known as Madonion, Futuremark has expanded its focus to go beyond its bread and butter, graphics and gaming, and tackle other areas, such as full system performance. That's where PCMark comes into play. The company's most recent addition to the PCMark family is Vantage. For most users, a full suite would be run, but because we're focused on storage performance only, we instead run only the storage-specific tests. Fortunately, Futuremark makes this easy for us to do as it has split up the entire suite into seven separate sub-tests, one being the aptly named "HDD Suite". PCMark's HDD Suite may look simple on the surface, but it's actually quite exhaustive. While the benchmark does deliver a simple "overall" result, it actually tests I/O performance based on a variety of scenarios, from adding music to Windows Media Player, to loading applications in succession, to editing video, to running a malware scanner, and more. It even includes metrics to evaluate a simulated Windows Vista boot time, so Futuremark has done a fine job of combining many useful scenarios into a single button press. Before jumping into the results, keep in mind that the SiliconEdge Blue uses the identical JMicron drive controller as the SNV425. The only difference is Western Digital wrote its own custom firmware. To date all other SSD manufacturers that use JMicron's controllers use the firmware supplied by that company. Therefore while it would be easy to dismiss the controller outright, the SiliconEdge Blue results do show what optimized firmware can do with this controller. With that over with, onto the results! The Corsair Nova 128GB drive overall slots in exactly where we would expect to see it, hot on the heels of the Vertex Turbo. The Vertex Turbo features a slightly overclocked but otherwise identical Barefoot controller and the same NAND memory, as such we can expect to see this pattern continue for the most part in the rest of our tests. Focusing solely on the final HDD Suite sub-score, we can clearly see that the Indilinx Barefoot controller surpasses all the other SSDs we have tested, save for the Sandforce SF-1200 powered Vertex 2 which is in a league of its own. To be fair the Vertex 2 is a whole new generation...

Corsair Nova Series V128 128GB SSD

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