Corsair P128 SSD review - Introduction

Ah yes, a new week, a new SSD review. These little puppies just keep entering the premises of the Guru3D test lab. SSD development is fast, constantly evolving and improving each and every month that passes. As a review site we constantly have to reposition and adapt and keep ourselves informed.

The one thing that we learned from the first generation consumer SSD drives though was that SSD technology had a severe limitation with tiny, small files, especially when a lot of them needed to be written simultaneously, the operating system started to clog up resulting in little system pauses/freezes.

It is for that reason alone that the new generation SSD drives now have cache embedded to cope and eliminate that problem. And dang, that does work fine. We've already shown you many reviews based on cached SSD drives, and they all pretty much rock, plain and simple.

What's the big advantage with an SSD compared to a HDD you ask ? Well, it's good to recap that information every now and then as all SSD review purely focus on the sheer READ/WRITE performance. The big advantage is of course that SSD drives do not have any mechanical and thus moving parts. Traditional HDD drives have their magnetic head spinning over the platters of your HDD. In terms of access time that's quite a drag when it comes to latency as that head needs to move consistently towards a given position on one of the platters. Also the rotational speed of these platters is limiting performance. 5400, 7200 and 10.000 RPM are most common speeds for consumer drives. Read - write performance for example with a WD VelociRaptor drive, can peak at 100 MB/sec. But really that's it. Also everything that moves will degrade over time and surely .. it makes noise.

All the factors and limitations mentioned above is something that SSD drives do not have. The access times are close to NIL, no mechanical moving parts that get degraded, no noise. With that in mind the past year SSD drives started to really evolve. Reliability improved, the small files issue was solved with the help of caches, and then performance, thanks to multi-channel technology, went up real hard real fast. In fact the performance levels are closing in rapidly to the limitations of the SATA2 specification. We have 260 MB/sec READ performance on some SSDs already, while that not even really old SATA2 specification can only manage 300 MB/sec at maximum. Yes, SATA3 will be released soon for this reason alone, doubling up that bandwidth, which is much needed with the rate things are going right now.

And with the aforementioned tale in mind ... we are going to startup a review on Corsairs latest offering. They have launched a new P series (Performance) SSD drives. Based on a kickass Samsung controller and Samsung MLC NAND flash memory we'll test a product that is specced with amazing performance. I say dear Sir, let's meet the Corsair P128, have a look at the photo and then head on over to the next page where we'll startup an in-depth look at this dazzling little storage device.