Corsair Releases “Extreme” SSD Line-up

It’s hard to say that the SSD game is heating up, because in reality, it’s been hot for a while. A day doesn’t go by when a company doesn’t release a new model – even companies we’ve up to this point have never heard of – but it’s all good, because as these new products get released, the prices go down. That’s a good thing, as the price has been the greatest deterrent for most people, so if trends from the past year are anything to go by, manageable densities should become a real viable solution very soon.

One company who’s been releasing quality SSDs for a while is Corsair, although unlike the majority of their competition, they aren’t releasing what seems like a dozen different series. Rather, they’re keeping things simple, and up to this point, we’ve seen Legacy (for older PCs, so they are slow) and also Performance, which is for those who want – you guessed it – the performance.

The company has just released their third series, called Extreme. The name basically says all, but with a 240MB/s Read and 170MB/s Write (sequential), the performance definitely earns it its name. Using the ever-popular Indilinx Barefoot controller, the new SSDs support both user-upgradeable firmware and updateable features, such as the TRIM command, which will be built into Windows 7.

Corsair didn’t touch on pricing in the press release, but you could likely expect to see the 128GB top-end model sell for just under $400, and the 32GB for $150.

“The combination of the Indilinx Barefoot controller, Samsung flash memory, and 64MB of on-board cache delivers blistering, stutter-free performance, eliminating the bottleneck imposed by traditional mechanical hard disks,” said Jim Carlton, VP of Marketing at Corsair. “The new Extreme Series SSDs are ideal for use as primary drives in desktop and notebooks systems, and also for RAID 0 configurations in high-performance desktops for enthusiasts who want extreme performance.”