Corsair Nova V128 SSD review - Introduction

Ever since the past year or so Corsair has becoming increasingly more focused in that huge growth market, Solid State Disks. Their Performance series was lovely, their X series extreme. And more recently they introduced no less than three new SSDs covering mainstream to high-end. Today we'll have a good look at the all new V series solid state disks, the V128GB Nova to be precise.

But let's quickly run through the three latest announcements before going in-depth into the Nova series SSDs. Corsairs new line of SSDs consist out of three products, the Nova, Reactor and Force solid state disks.

Reactor - The Reactor has similar specifications but is equipped with a mini-USB connector and 128MB cache. The 60GB model offers read speeds of up to 250MB/s and write speeds of 110MB/s, while the 120GB model promises read speeds of up to 250MB/s and write speeds of up to 170MB/s. This part is interesting because it uses a JMicron controller. Now, JMicron has a bit of a bad reputation in the SSD market because its controllers suffered from bottleneck issues due to lacking caches, but Corsair points out that the new JMF612 incorporates 128MB of DDR2 cache for stuffer-free performance. The 60GB and 120GB Reactor drives go for 154 and 300 Euro, respectively.

Nova - The Nova is a 2.5-inch SATA 3Gbps SATA2 model with either 64GB or 128GB MLC NAND flash memory, is comes with a 64MB memory and is based on an Indilinx controller with a 64MB cache tied to it. These puppies show 270MB/s read speeds. Write performance as advertised is 130MB/s for the V64 model and 195MB/s for the V128 model. The 64GB and 128GB Nova SSDs are priced at about 163 and 308 Euro.

Force - The all new Force series is now official as well. Corsair's Force series are SandForce controller based SSDs. These 2.5" disks will be available later this month in 100GB (F100) and 200GB (F200) MLC NAND flash capacities, they have a SATA 3Gbps interface and promises read speeds of up to 285MB/s and write speeds of up to 275MB/s thanks to a SandForce SF-1200 SSD controller combined with massively  fast MLC flash memory, the Corsair Force Series of solid-state drives deliver outstanding performance figures of up to 280MB/sec read and 260MB/sec write. Pricing on this series has not yet been announced.

All the drives support TRIM command in Windows 7, which helps to maintain optimal performance over the drive’s lifetime.

That being said .. we test the 128GB version op the Nova series, the V128 ... by using 34nm Micron NAND memory, Corsair was able to lower the price on this product series a little. Making it very interesting product for a lot of you. Have a peek at the product and then let's head onwards into the review.