Corsair Neutron XTi 480 GB SSD review - Introduction

Corsair Neutron XTi 480GB SSD
High-End SATA3 Corsair Powah!

Corsair unleashed its new Neutron XTi series SSDs. The Corsair Neutron XTi 480 GB SSD we put under some heavy testing should be a notch more price-competitive yet offers enthusiast class SATA3 performance. Armed with truckloads of performance and that attractive pricing, Corsair will lead the way not just in performance, but also its dandy cool looks.

As you guys know, we've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning, and it is surprising to see where we have gotten. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though. While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing at a fast pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking! You get between 450 MB/s to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 which is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that, over the past year, NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices a year ago settled at just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. These days a good SSD can be found under 50 cents per GB. With parties like Samsung, Toshiba and Micron the prices now have dropped towards and below the 30 cents per GB marker. This means that SSD technology and NAND storage has gone mainstream and due to the lower prices, the volume sizes go up as well. A couple of years ago a 64 GB SSD was hot stuff, then slowly we moved to 120 GB, last year 240 GB for an SSD in a PC was the norm, upcoming year we'll transition slowly to roughly 500 GB per SSD as the norm with sub 150 USD prices. With the market being so huge, fierce and competitive, it brought us to where we are today... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has a HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive and retrieve my bigger chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise. 

Corsair released the larger capacity and updated Neutron XT series towards the XTi. The product series is still based on that familiar 8-channel Phison PS3110 S10 controller but has been tweaked, got a NAND refresh and an increase in DRAM Cache size. The low power 4-core controller paired with the latest 15nm Toshiba 64GB MLC NAND ICs make sure that this puppy will be among the fastest we have tested (on SATA3) as we are looking at sustained performance at 560 MB/sec. IOPS numbers aren't shy either and rated at 90,000 IOPS on writes (4K aligned)  towards a massive  100,000 marker on reads. Overall, the XTi series performance is maxed out at whatever your SATA3 interface can handle really. Corsair for the XTi doubles up on the DRAM cache as well, this 480GB SSD will receive two 512MB DRAM cache chips which will help out greatly with larger workloads. Also improved are the Neutron XTi's TBW ratings, they have been increased over the Neutron XT as the Neutron XTi carries a TBW rating of 320TB for the 480GB model. Corsair guarantees the 480 GB for 5 years or thus that 320 terabytes written (TBW). 

Have a peek at the SSD, and then let's head onwards into the review.