Saturday, June 19th 2010
Corsair Shatters SSD Affordability Barrier
Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced a new milestone in the affordability of Corsair Solid State Drives. For a limited time, Corsair's award-winning Nova Series SSDs are available for as little as $69.99 after mail-in rebate.
"The 32GB Nova Series SSD is great for streamlined boot drives, netbook upgrades, and even RAID configurations," stated Jim Carlton, VP of Marketing at Corsair. "The aggressive pricing of these drives makes the benefits of SSDs accessible to everyone."
Nova Series of SSDs have been well reviewed the world over for their excellent combination of performance and price. ZDnet said of the 128GB Nova Series, "...among its peers, the 128GB Corsair Nova hits the right capacity/price/performance point and so is our overall choice." And Computerbase in Germany stated, "The Corsair Nova was able to convince in all tests and did not show any weaknesses.... it is one of the most interesting SSDs on the market and has thus earned our recommendation."
Corsair's Nova Series 32GB SSD delivers read speeds up to 195 MB/s and write speeds up to 70 MB/s for outstanding system performance, fast system start-ups, quicker game and application loads for your daily needs. The built-in 64MB cache ensures smooth stutter-free operation for reliable performance. It is supplied with a three year warranty, and is backed up by Corsair's highly regarded customer service and technical support.
"The 32GB Nova Series SSD is great for streamlined boot drives, netbook upgrades, and even RAID configurations," stated Jim Carlton, VP of Marketing at Corsair. "The aggressive pricing of these drives makes the benefits of SSDs accessible to everyone."
Corsair's Nova Series 32GB SSD delivers read speeds up to 195 MB/s and write speeds up to 70 MB/s for outstanding system performance, fast system start-ups, quicker game and application loads for your daily needs. The built-in 64MB cache ensures smooth stutter-free operation for reliable performance. It is supplied with a three year warranty, and is backed up by Corsair's highly regarded customer service and technical support.
89 Comments on Corsair Shatters SSD Affordability Barrier
High read speeds improve game performance. Sometimes a game can catch no matter how good your cpu/gpu is just because your hard drive spent a bit of time figuring out where a file it needed was. That is extremely common in games like oblivion where it has to figure out plant/npc/etc. placement as you're walking through the map, and I definitely notice it going on.
Also, SSDs have a significantly lower chance of failing. Replacing a dead drive through RMAing doesn't make up for lost data and you spend money on backup anyways.
32GB is just not enough for most people, let's create a poll:rolleyes: :D
*For netbook users
serverfault.com/questions/23621/any-benefit-or-detriment-from-removing-a-pagefile-on-an-8gb-ram-machine
No matter how much ram you have, windows is inherently designed to use a pagefile... its just meant to do so. Taking it away causes panic when you get near the end of your physical memory. Perhaps you never get near the end of your physical memory, in which case you'll be fine for the most part, but it just simply isn't good business. Windows expects a pagefile to exist.
As for other programs, I suppose you probably don't do any 3DS Max work, or video editing. Try doing that without a pagefile. When active file size (loaded into either real of virtual memory) gets higher than 10gbs at points, good luck having that all stored in ram. If there's no pagefile, then you're going to have MAJOR slowdown, not to mention a ton of hard drive thrashing. That's where this drive would fit perfectly.
Damn, I've become an average computer user:shadedshuWell, the good thing is I've yet to find a program crashing just because I have no pagefile. Last time I checked, there was no pagefile present on my system.
They were ok for netbook as far as shock durability goes and lower power consumption when idling. But other than that i didn't really see much difference in performance.
Same goes for desktop. I found that Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB and WD Caviar Black 2TB are by far better choices. They are both very fast, very big for its segment and by far cheaper than any SSD half the size. I mean, that Caviar Black 2TB cost the same as some crappy 128GB SSD. And i can store almost half an internet on it opposed to crappy 128GB for these times. Hybrid drives would be much better option today really. I wouldn't mind a WD Caviar Black 2TB with dedicated 32GB SSD SLC cache. For 300 EUR ? Massive chunk of space + speed + ok price = pure win.
anyway:
look on your C: drive, and i bet one is there. if its not, run a game/photoshop/etc and check (without quitting the program)
Left some screen corruption and element garble in Firefox and Visual Studio as well, so I suspect that was a memory issue.
So what we've learned: yes, you can turn the pagefile completely off, but no, it's not good practice, not even with 8GB in your system :D
The performance was noticeable for boot time and slightly for initial start of Firefox and Paint.NET.
But since Windows caching mechanisms in Vista kick in automatically even when using HDD, that improvement got limited to boot time only. Which i honestly don't really care with Hybrid Sleep and Hibernation technologies. Besides, cold boot took less than 1 minute on my system with old Spinpoint F1. It takes even less with faster Caviar Black 2TB which is much much faster.