Details
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Price: $282
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Manufacturer site: www.corsair.com
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Ratings: 5/10
It seems that 256GB is the current sweet
spot when it comes to SSD capacities, with this size on offer in four of this
test’s six drives. Corsair’s Neutron GTX is the firm’s latest high-end drive,
and it’s the most expensive 256GB SSD on test at $282.
Corsair
Neutron GTX 240GB
That works out at 84p-per0gigabyte, which
is the highest figure for any of these SSDs, so it’s clear that Corsair has to
work hard in order to justify its lofty price.
Corsair hasn’t picked a high-end controller
from a recognizable name, though; instead, this drive is built around a chip
from obscure Californian company Link_A_Media, which itself has been purchased
by SK Hynix – a South Korean company that makes flash memory chips.
Little is known about the LM87800
controller, but we do know that it’s partnered with 24nm Toggle Mode NAND. It’s
not the most efficient manufacturing process in this group, though, and the
Toshiba-made Toggle Mode architecture isn’t designed to improve speed either.
It eliminates the clock cycle inside the memory, which improves efficiency
rather than pure pace.
There’s a question mark hanging over this
drive’s performance, then, and the Corsair returned a disappointing set of
answers in our benchmarks. The Neutron’s AS SSD sequential read and write
results of 393MB/s and 435MB/s are the worst of any in this test, and matters
barely improved in the rest of AS SSD’s benchmarks. Its 4KB read and write
scores of 27MB/s and 83MB/s are mediocre, and 4KB-64 results of 363MB/s and
299MB/s sit in the middle of our performance table.
The
Corsair’s minimum read pace of 52MB/s in ATTO Disk Benchmark is good
The Corsair didn’t pick up the pace in
CrystalDiskMark either. Its sequential read result of 530MB/s is reasonable,
but it’s let down by a sequential write result of 456MB/s – only ahead of the
SanDisk in this group of drives. Elsewhere, it’s unable to natch the pace of
this test’s fastest SSDs.
The Corsair’s minimum read pace of 52MB/s
in ATTO Disk Benchmark is good, but its minimum write result of 8MB/s is the worst
in the group. The pattern continued elsewhere: the drive’s average read result
of 423MB/s is respectable, but its average write pace of 345MB/s is poor.
Corsair sweetens the deal elsewhere: the
five-year warranty is as long as anything else in this test, and the inclusion
of a 2.5” -to- 3.5” bracket and all of the relevant screws means the Neutron
GTX can be used out of the box.
However, it’s just not quick enough to
compete with other drives in this price range. If it was cheaper, it’d be a
viable mid-range contender, but at the high end, the likes of Samsung and OCZ
are just too last and no more expensive.
