Corsair Accelerator 30GB and 60GB SSD Cache Drives

Looking for a little performance boost for your system? Overclockers Club has a review of Corsair's 30GB and 60GB Accelerator SSD cache drives that should be of interest to you then.

Will you get full-on SSD performance numbers out of the Accelerator drives when used as caching drives? No, they are not meant to offer this kind of performance, but are instead designed to improve upon the disk performance of the spindle drive you already have installed in a system. Do the Accelerator drives offer a significant boost in drive performance in your day-to-day usage model? A resounding YES!

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Looks interesting. Did they say it was a Sata2 only solution?....hmmm....

Meh, just skimmed the article, heading off to work...looks like they are targeting people who don't want to do a clean OS install/transfer and general I see these popping up in retail brick and mortar more than regular SSDs for the non-technical user looking for a speed boast.
Price per GB looks to be on-par with SSDs

I don't really see the point of these drives/software other than you're lazy. And paranoid about SSD drives going down.

I see these as similar to the hybrid drives. You could install them in various relatives machines and not have to worry about SSD management at all. Although I'm not sure if this solution would still boot correctly if the SSD died unlike the hybrid drive solution.

For instance, my wife demands a fast PC, something near my PC's speed. I didn't want to have to manager her SSD space or have a raid setup on her system. So I installed one of those 750GB seagate hybrids and told her she has an SSD. Same with my mothers system too. They both are happy and I don't have to worry about the SSD dying or raid failing, etc. This solution seems very similar to one of those...

While these are similar in function to the Seagate hybrid drive, they seem to have generally better performance, at the cost of a little bit of CPU load. Most people have CPU cycles to burn, so they won't notice. And for people that already have a large spindle drive that they are happy with, this is a cheaper (and easier to implement) solution than replacing it with a hybrid drive.

In theory this a is a good idea. I don't like the fact that a MLC drive is used (Intel's implementation uses a SLC drive for good reason) and really don't like the fact that Corsair uses Sandforce equipment.

I really love Corsair equipment and my computer is full of it. I will never buy one of their SSDs unless they switch to Samsung or Intel components.

Uses the same funky NVELO Dataplex software that the OCZ Synapse uses. I owned a Synapse earlier this year and it was a disaster. Constant crashes and cache drive rebuilds. Luckily I was able to uninstall it and go back to my HD without reinstalling, others were not so lucky. That POS got returned for a refund.

Don't touch this with a 10 foot pole. 128gb SSD's are under $100 now, just go that route.

Huh?

I asked the question in a forum on here about "what do I need to do to swap out cache drives because I don't want to have to re-install my operating system" and the general consensus was "you shouldn't have to; just deactivate the (old) cache drive in Windows in the Intel RST applet, power down, remove the drive, power up, make sure you can boot just off the hard drive, power down, install the new cache drive, power up, bring up the RST applet and activate the new drive as the cache drive, and you're done".

Yet the first thing this article says is: "Compared to the traditional Intel Rapid Storage Technology, the Accelerator series does not require re-installing the operating system after removing the cache drive."

So, what the hell? Do the people writing this article not know what they're talking about, or was I given the wrong info and DO need to worry about re-installing my OS if I want to swap out my cache drive?!?

This article is pretty bad.

I'm sure that the included software is great if you have no other options available, but I seriously doubt it operates on the same level as Intel SRT that includes integration down to the bios level.

Using Intel's IRST requires you to set up the drive as part of a RAID array, which has to be done when the operating system is installed. If you need to remove the cache drive you will need to re-install the operating system.

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It seems pretty obvious that whoever wrote the article has never even used real Intel SRT caching. You do need to have your SATA controller set to raid, but enabling SRT itself is as simple as putting an SSD in your system and clicking the Accelerate button in the SRT app. You certainly DO NOT need to re-install the Operating System to remove the cache drive. You can disable it in the control panel and then shut down. Even if the SSD simply died all of your data would still be fully intact on your mechanical drive.

BallerX said:

In theory this a is a good idea. I don't like the fact that a MLC drive is used (Intel's implementation uses a SLC drive for good reason) and really don't like the fact that Corsair uses Sandforce equipment.

I really love Corsair equipment and my computer is full of it. I will never buy one of their SSDs unless they switch to Samsung or Intel components.

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I've seen so significant degradation on any MLC drive I've ever used. Also, Intel themselves has begun to use Sandforce controllers. Just food for thought.

GotNoRice said:

It seems pretty obvious that whoever wrote the article has never even used real Intel SRT caching. You do need to have your SATA controller set to raid, but enabling SRT itself is as simple as putting an SSD in your system and clicking the Accelerate button in the SRT app. You certainly DO NOT need to re-install the Operating System to remove the cache drive. You can disable it in the control panel and then shut down. Even if the SSD simply died all of your data would still be fully intact on your mechanical drive.

I've seen so significant degradation on any MLC drive I've ever used. Also, Intel themselves has begun to use Sandforce controllers. Just food for thought.

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That's a bit of a relief...I suspect the stuff I have seen on the web of people who've had to reinstall the operating system did NOT follow the directions and start out with just a hard drive in their system, set to RAID in the BIOS, and installing the OS on that drive first, BEFORE adding the SSD and setting it up in the SRT app. I did go through all that when I got my Z68 mobo.

In my case, I'm using an old Intel 40GB gen 2 SSD in my PC, and my system has noticeably slowed down in the past month or so. I've got a Sandforce 1 60GB drive lying around unused and figured I'd swap it out, but don't want to risk my system to do so (I'm really tired of rebuilding systems at this point - used to be sort of fun, now it's a chore).

BallerX said:

In theory this a is a good idea. I don't like the fact that a MLC drive is used (Intel's implementation uses a SLC drive for good reason) and really don't like the fact that Corsair uses Sandforce equipment.

I really love Corsair equipment and my computer is full of it. I will never buy one of their SSDs unless they switch to Samsung or Intel components.

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"intel components"

all modern intel drives are rebranded marvell drives (which corsair sells) and rebranded sandforce drives (corsair also sells)

you can even buy corsair drives with toggle nand, something you can't do with intel's latest