Corsair V128 Nova Review

Introduction

This Monday sees another of our old favourite, the SSD, come through the OC3D secret underground testing facility. Rarely does any hardware have more predictable responses in our comments section with the opinion split between wonderful and expensive.

Thanks to recent reductions in the price of NAND flash, Solid State Drives are slowly creeping down in price. That isn't to say they are as affordable as mechanical drives, but for something that gives the same equivalent performance gain as a new processor or monster graphics card, they are exactly the price you'd expect.

Today we take a look at the latest in a long line of Corsair SSDs, the Nova.

Technical Specifications

Before we discuss what we have, here are the specifications from the Corsair website.

Three big technological things to take note of here. Firstly we have an Indilinx Barefoot controller which is the controller of choice for high end SSDs. Allied to this is 64MB of Elpida cache and, of the two major NAND manufacturers, Corsair have chosen to use Intel rather than Samsung memory chips. We'll take a closer look at these later on.

The other interesting thing is that Corsair claim the performance is 270MB/s read and 195MB/s write. Heady numbers indeed. Of course we all know what to make of claimed performance, but Corsair rarely over-state their case and if they are accurate we could be looking at quite a beast here.