Saturday, June 19th 2010
Corsair Shatters SSD Affordability Barrier
Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced a new milestone in the affordability of Corsair Solid State Drives. For a limited time, Corsair's award-winning Nova Series SSDs are available for as little as $69.99 after mail-in rebate.
"The 32GB Nova Series SSD is great for streamlined boot drives, netbook upgrades, and even RAID configurations," stated Jim Carlton, VP of Marketing at Corsair. "The aggressive pricing of these drives makes the benefits of SSDs accessible to everyone."
Nova Series of SSDs have been well reviewed the world over for their excellent combination of performance and price. ZDnet said of the 128GB Nova Series, "...among its peers, the 128GB Corsair Nova hits the right capacity/price/performance point and so is our overall choice." And Computerbase in Germany stated, "The Corsair Nova was able to convince in all tests and did not show any weaknesses.... it is one of the most interesting SSDs on the market and has thus earned our recommendation."
Corsair's Nova Series 32GB SSD delivers read speeds up to 195 MB/s and write speeds up to 70 MB/s for outstanding system performance, fast system start-ups, quicker game and application loads for your daily needs. The built-in 64MB cache ensures smooth stutter-free operation for reliable performance. It is supplied with a three year warranty, and is backed up by Corsair's highly regarded customer service and technical support.
"The 32GB Nova Series SSD is great for streamlined boot drives, netbook upgrades, and even RAID configurations," stated Jim Carlton, VP of Marketing at Corsair. "The aggressive pricing of these drives makes the benefits of SSDs accessible to everyone."
Corsair's Nova Series 32GB SSD delivers read speeds up to 195 MB/s and write speeds up to 70 MB/s for outstanding system performance, fast system start-ups, quicker game and application loads for your daily needs. The built-in 64MB cache ensures smooth stutter-free operation for reliable performance. It is supplied with a three year warranty, and is backed up by Corsair's highly regarded customer service and technical support.
89 Comments on Corsair Shatters SSD Affordability Barrier
12 - 16 GB of RAM probably won't do it as my project files vary from 25 - 50 GB of imported media.
25 - 50 GB of RAM to avoid using a pagefile is NOT cost effective for me.
1 of these to use as a pagefile is.
All gone :p
No matter what you have for pagefile, it will be many thousand times slower than RAM anyway, so no big difference. The goal is to stay instructions away from pagefile as much as possible.
But if you have 50GB of data to load to RAM at once, than :respect:
And as for filling up a netbook, ya well they're not meant to be a desktop replacement anyway so that's really a personal reference. I've had the laptop in sig for a year now, and i still have about 25GB free. :P
Still :)
If you need to go from town A to town B. You usually drive motorway and some 120km/h. If you run out of gas, there is no real difference if you push your car at 0.01km/h or 0.02km/h ;)
P.S. seems like we are getting off topic here... :)
And your other point... I said that I didn't want to waste a 640GB HDD on a pagefile. If this SSD comes to UK in the same price region as the 640GB WDCB 6GB/s, then I'd rather have the SSD. I'd be stupid not to.
I can stash it up in my PC case easier than a HDD, it's quieter, it won't make me feel like I'm wasting 600GB, etc. It's not just the performance factor, these appeal to ME for a lot of reasons.
I've got a Silverstone Raven 2 and I've run out of space for HDD's. Had to order an Evercool Armour to make use to the 5.25" bays, with a total of 6 HDD's in there but not enough space for more... SSD's to the rescue!
But, as brandonwh64 pointed out, that write speed does look a bit gammy.
My point to RejZoR is that it's impossible for ME to avoid a pagefile without an extra £1000 spare.
Or I could just get 1 of these drives and save £900.
That reason alone makes this drive far from useless for ME
Where's TIGR when you need him? This is his area of expertise!
Use perfmon (just type to start bar) and add counter memory->Pages/sec. This will show you memory hard faults (when data needs to be retrieved from pagefile rather than cache). There are also counters that will show you real pagefile usage.
And it's L1>L2>L3>RAM>HDD :)
All I'm saying is that there is a common misunderstanding that a pagefile should be put on a fastest storage available. As in fact there is very little difference if it is on a 200MB/s drive or on a 50MB/s. There will be no noticeable difference for the user - if the hard fault rate is high, the system will crawl anyway.
So at the end - use the fastest store for useful stuff like OS files, program files or even documents first. And only then, if there is still space available, pagefile.
I know, I understand, we're just on slightly different wavelengths. Even if I get no performance gain, I can stick this SSD nicely away in my case and maybe actually have some room for my card reader. There's more than one reason I'm considering getting 1/2 of these!
Then there's noise, power consumption, and heat. The difference between any decent HDD and an SSD will be going from "very quiet" to silent, and 5-10w of power consumption per HDD, and a couple degrees of heat dumped into the case per HDD. The degree to which these things matter will vary from system to system and user to user, but to me, a couple degrees, several watts, and the elimination of an already-quiet noise from the computer is not worth paying even double the price per GB, much less 43 times. And of course, most systems out there that have SSDs will still have an HDD as well, because most of us have more data to store than we can fit on any SSD we can afford.
Which leaves us with latency, the SSD's "killer feature." It makes things "feel snappy." Very nice, but can latency alone increase your gaming FPS, multimedia conversion/encoding/rendering performance, data compression rate, encryption/decryption/file copying speed, or any other kind of performance other than making things that already only take a few seconds, take a few milliseconds?
I have no doubt that SSDs are the future of data storage. I like them and the way they make a system feel. I've used them in dozens of builds and the customers loved them. Their performance and price have both improved drastically over the past few years. I look forward to saying good-bye to HDDs more than I can put into words. And I believe they are priced about as low as they reasonably can be, given today's raw NAND flash memory costs.
But "affordable?" Maybe compared to some other SSDs. But in the cases of myself personally as well as the majority of my customers, these do not offer anything needed, much less at a price that makes them what I'd consider a "cost-effective alternative" to HDDs (single or in one type of RAID or another, as appropriate to the situation).
More power to those for whom these are a good choice; I'm just sharing my own perspective because to me, "affordable" does not apply.
Surprise, surprise!3x32 for 240 in raid 0 or a single 96gb for 250? You don't usually use a high capacity drive for your OS, and you're not going to get better price/performance than this for a while.