Corsair V128 Nova Review
Conclusion
Published: 19th April 2010 | Source: Corsair | Price: £292.72 |
Conclusion
Anyone who has ever used an SSD or, if you're fortunate enough, owns one will talk until we're blue in the face about how amazing they are. How they can transform even the most average system into a performance beast.
We've run multiple reviews that demonstrate the clear difference between a mechanical HDD and an SSD and yet some always talk about how the price per gigabyte is ridiculous. Because of course you can get 128GB of DDR3 for 300 notes can't you.
Sadly those people seem to never be able to be convinced. So to the more open minded in the audience we'll say for what feels like the thousandth time, save up, sell your Granny, do what you have to but if you haven't got an SSD in your system you will never unleash its full potential.
Now we've established that you want an SSD, is the Corsair Nova series the SSD you want?
Price wise it's very much on a par with most of the 128GB drives on the market. So not the cheapest upgrade you can ever find, but certainly the one that will give you the best reward.
Compared to its rivals, it's a stunner. With Trim support as standard, 200MB/s write speeds and 270 MB/s read speeds it is as fast and reliable as anything on the market. Even in big sustained read testing it still happily blazes along at 250MB/s and puts the Crucial M225, which uses the same controller and cache chips, in its shadow.
So what are the bad points? Before anyone out there thinks they are clever by shouting "Price", you're wrong. For a 128GB SSD this is in the mid to low price bracket and so outstandingly priced.
Intel RST 9.6 allows the TRIM command to be passed from controller to the OS/host when the controller is in RAID mode, so you can have HDD RAID and an SSD with TRIM. But it doesn’t support SSDs in RAID with TRIM. Background Garbage Collection (BGC) is the firmware-level block cleaning system that works independently of the OS, so this will still work in RAID arrays, and do a good job of maintaining performance. In our tests, BGC pretty much keeps it running at peak speeds in RAID 0.
This is a premium product indeed, delivering epic speeds at a reasonable price from a manufacturer you know is good with customer support. It looks the part and does the business. Highly recommended indeed and a worthy winner of our Editors Choice award.
Pros
- Blazingly Fast
- Outstanding write speeds
- Consistently quick in all applications
- Priced competitively
- Comes with a drive-bay adaptor
Middling
- Nothing
Bad
- Zilch. NOTHING.
Thanks to Corsair for providing us with todays review sample. Discuss in our forums.
Most Recent Comments
|
Originally Posted by name='Chewbacca'
I want one! Does it really make that much of a difference going from a normal HDD to an SSD?
|
At such a low capacity, u would probably end up using ur old drive as a means to store stuff, leaving mainly the OS, and ur malware etc on the SSD.
For definite, if the cash is available and u don't use much harddrive space, they're great. But apparently having the cash to buy a pc component is not meant to be the way to look at it, ur meant to look at them value for money. Bang for buck. Speed for sure - capacity (the bread and butter of drives) a definite no. Some people will buy these then complain about the prices of other things, e.g.
I use them in many pc/mac setups now and tbh, if ur OS is installed and maintained efficiently, there are just as viable alternatives, leaving u to spend ur cash on more important components.
|
Originally Posted by name='nunzio'
What I would like to see as a test is if you keep your OS/System on a hdd, and put the games installed on the ssd, would that make much of a difference?
|
/digs up results
With the OS and game installed on a P128, a level in Crysis loaded in 18s, compared to 22s with the OS on a 7200.11 and the game installed on the P128. Game and OS on the 7200.11 was 40s.
So there's still a hefty benefit, but really you get the most from an SSD when you use it as an OS and game data drive (for gamers).
CSS Valid
Continue Reading