Solid-State Showdown

Two RAM Leaders' SSDs Square Off

 

The solid-state storage market has really been heating up as oflate, with a con­stant influx of faster-and sometimes more affordable-drives, in addition to firmware updates that enhance the performance of existing products. For example, fierce memory rivals Corsair and ocz recently began offering new products designed to compete in a few performance categories with Intel's much-heralded X25-M, the Corsair P256 (model tested: CMFSSD­256GBG2D), and the ocz Vertex Series SATA II SSD (model tested: OCZSSD2- 1 VTX120G), respectively. The Corsair P256 and OCZ Vertex Series drives share some similarities, namely their 2.5-inch form factors, SATA 3Gbps interfaces, and Samsung MLC NAND flash memory chips that reside at the hearts of the drives. Setting up the drives was simple and straightforward. And neither exhibited any compatibility problems with Intel-, Nvidia-, or AMD-based southbridges on various Gigabyte- or Asus-built motherboards. But each uses a different controller tech­nology to manage the data being sent to and retrieved from the drive, which results in drastically different performance, as you'll see in our benchmark results. As its name suggests, the Corsair P256 is a 256GB SSD. It features a sturdy, brushed aluminum shell, which encases a new Sam­sung S3C29RBB01-YK40 drive controller and double-stacked flash memory, as well as 64MB of onboard cache. The OCZ Vertex Series drives, which are available in capacities ranging from 30 to 250GB, also sport 64MB of cache and hard metal cas­ings, but the OCZ drives use Indilinx IDX110MOO-LC drive controllers. access time. And although both drives blow past Intel's X2 5- M in terms of average se­quential write speeds, neither could come dose to the excellent X25-M in random writes, as is evident by the Intel drive's dominant performance in the IOMeter tests. Both Corsair and OCZ S drives' per­formance is a significant step up from tradi­tional hard drives. One area where the Corsair P256 and OCZ Vertex Series 120GB drives (sort of) blow away Intel is price. The 256GB P256's $699 and the 120GB OCZ Vertex Series' $345 price tags are higher than Intel's $319 80GB X25-M. Those prices, however, equate to a $2.73 and a $2.87 cost per giga­byte for the Corsair and OCZ drives, re­spectively. The Intel X25-M commands a hefty $3.98 per gigabyte.   by Marco Chiappetta