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We've seen a plethora of new SSDs come to market this past year, some of which have been geared towards upping the performance ante while others have attempted to make the price-per-GB ratio a bit more appealing. Corsair's new Extreme Series X256 focuses solely on the former and turns a blind eye towards the latter.
"The new 256GB Extreme Series X256 is a response to the growing popularity of high-capacity SSDs, and it joins our Performance Series P256 at the top of its range, for enthusiasts who want the fastest speeds and plenty of space available for their pictures, music, and videos."
The new drive combines the Indilinx Barefoot controller with Samsung MLC NAND flash memory and is aimed at "enthusiasts who don't want to compromise on speed or capacity." To that end, the 256GB drive boasts read speeds of up to 240MB/s and write speeds of up to 170MBs, 64MB of cache to help prevent stuttering, and user-upgradeable firmware.
Only those with a healthy bank account need apply, as the 256GB SSD will set you back 700 smackers.
Image Credit: Corsair
Comments are closed on this article
wetjet550
August 26, 2009 at 3:20pm
I believe the future of SSD storage will go towards the PCIe bus. Forget sata2 or 3! Once the new PCIe bus comes out, and SSDs are at a point where cost isn't such an issue any longer, a PCIe bus ssd destroys 4 raid-0 sataII ssds!
Read up on the benchmark tests here:
http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fusionio-vs-Intel-X25M-SSD-RAID-Grudge-Match/?page=1
killerxx7
August 25, 2009 at 5:45pm
Meh i would rather have 7 fast 1tb hdds then one "faster" 256gb drive,
i mean come on 700 for a drive that i could only fit a qauter of my music i mean i have 2x 160 gb rapters filled to the brim just with windows/apps and a few games.
These drives are pointless without a high performance sata controler that will set you back around 1k so basicly 1.7k for 256gb of fast storage lol i think 7tb sounds alot better tbh.
Meh i think this will only be populer for benchers and for pros who work with photoshop/vid rendering(encoding) even severs wont find this usefull since most of them are still using the SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) ptotocol since it ofer better random reed/right times and have much larger capacitys at the same if not better speeds.
All this said im sure with a high end contoler this drive will kick some sereios ass in the benches but im 100% sure 2 lower end drives in raid would beet it at a lower price.
mesiah
August 25, 2009 at 5:09pm
Until SATA 3.0 is fully supported I see no reason to pay big bucks for these "high performance" SSDs. The standard versions already saturate SATA 3Gbps bandwidth. The performance increases you get for the high performance drives are pretty marginal compared to the increase you get from going from spinning media to NAND flash. Personally I will stick with the standard indilinx drives until SATA 3.0 can open up the bandwidth envelope.
imemmittsmith
August 25, 2009 at 12:47pm
Does anyone remember when the first 1gb drive came out in the 90's and it was $800. My brother bought one and never thought he would fill it up. lol Just think how much $800 was back around 1995 compared to today. Still hard to see paying that much, but one day I will have one or two. :o)
chaosdsm
August 25, 2009 at 11:25am
$700 is a bargain... compared to Intel's X25-E 64GB drive which is also at the $700 mark, & with about the same performance numbers 250/170 Vs 240/170, & you get 4 times the capacity. Of course I don't have $700 to spend on a hard drive. Sure it would be nice to see this kind of capacity & performance for under $1/GB, but it won't be happening anytime soon, probably 2011 or later if the economy drags on like it is...
