Corsair Neutron Series 256GB SSD Refresh Review @ [H]

Corsair Neutron Series 256GB SSD Refresh Review - Corsair keeps pace with continuing innovation in the NAND market by switching from 25nm IMFT NAND to the rarely seen 22nm SK Hynix NAND. This NAND provides a lower price point and extra capacity. Today we take a look to see if the Neutron Series performance remains and how this new SSD build stacks up to the competition.

It's great to see SSDs keep expanding in size, performance, and dropping in price.

A word of warning, however. There are still compatibility issues being worked out, and these devices may not be as compatible as the controller chip-sets of companies that have been in the HD business for years/decades. Your last review convinced me to pick up a Corsair Neutron GTX 120GB a while back for my Dell laptop. Unfortunately, in the internal slot the drive constantly generates SATA I/O errors and is unuseable. Other drives work in the internal slot fine. In the external slot, and on my desktop, the corsair drive works OK. An RMA on the drive resulted in me receiving a drive with the exact same compatibility issues.

So, while the tech is great and getting better, there are improvements to be made and lessons learned from the newcomers, yet.

Man- every SSD review you guys post re-impresses me with the value and performance of the Samsung 840 TLC. way cheaper than the rest, and still performing as well as just about anything but the 840 Pro.

Excellent review guys.

FYI, the last sentence says Neutron GTX instead of just Neutron. Not a big deal but that's the most important sentence in the whole article!

On page 3:

There are 8 NAND packages of 16GB each, but with a lower overprovisioning percentage than the 12.7% used with the initial version of the Neutron Series SSDs. This new version features 256GB of user addressable capacity.

Click to expand...

Last time I checked 8 * 16 was 128 and not 256? Can't seem to find a datasheet on the used Hynix ICs.

Nice review. Thanks for also including some current prices on the reviewed models as well.

I haven't jumped into the SSD playpen yet, reliability is concern for me. Glad to see it's getting better.

2 million mtbf!? = 228 years. How does that translate into the maximum reads/writes? I guess 5 year warranty is a good indication. I leave my pc on 24/7, I've always worried that if I went to SSD's they would prematurely fail because I let it run all the time.