Gadgetory

this is a guy's course there is a hundred percent serious about the SSD game for the first time they have an exclusive unique controller design that they are shipping in their new Neutron and neutron GTX lying products so we've got the neutron GTX here today this is the 240 gig capacity drive so much like Sam force drives Corsair is setting aside about 13% of the total flash capacity for spare area which allows the drive to remain keep the performance higher over time as it fills up with data as well as just generally behave more more smoothly it also gives it a little bit of extra so when cell eventually and guys there's no avoiding this the cells do eventually die and then it can use some of the spare area to compensate for that over time if you keep your drive for a very long time so we have the 240 gig drive this is using a totally new totally custom controller so let's go ahead and get this opened up and have a look at gun great package here of course there is so good at packaging shiny red se two three seven millimeter right don't worry I'll cover all this stuff in a moment I'm just trying to figure out how to get it open here so inside the box we've got let's see a warranty against defects cool notification for Australian customers I must have gotten like an international temple or something okay we've got one of those two and a half inch to three and a half inch adapters we've got screws for screwing into you know things such as your system or the adapter okay there are two sets of screws small ones for this big ones for this now let's get into the drive itself so this is using a link a media LM 87 800 controller it is a dual core controller dual arm cores actually with 256 Meg's of fairly fast fairly fast cache memory are ya can do second sorry guys brain fart I was looking for a ddr2 800 cache memory which is pretty fast compared to some of the other stuff out there I mean crucial is using ddr3 but actually clocked slower so yeah okay so let's talk about what is when how this how this came to be so Corsair has entered into an agreement with link a medium where they are actually collaborating and working together on this controller architecture on this drive to the point where even both of them are doing quality control because I know for a lot of consumers who have bought SSDs early on in their lifespans in the past they've been burned with things like firmware issues or things like even data crops I mean even Intel hasn't been free from this micron crucial had a had a firmware bug that caused the drives to just stop working after a set amount of time being powered on which they then fixed with the firmware update however both blinky media and Corsair are doing extensive validation with this drive and the firmware update process is extremely easy and Corsairs estimating anywhere from about three days to issue a fix for any kind of firmware bugs that they find and then from there two weeks to determine if it breaks anything that was that wasn't broken by applying the fix so overall I'm expecting good things I think Corsair is uh I mean I think we all know that Corsair is pretty much a okay when it comes to supporting their products so I'm very excited to see how this shapes up over time because as much as the performance is great announced the state of 3dr does support trim maintains reasonable performance over time even if you hammered really hard and performs right up there with really high performance drives like the Intel 520 the vertex 4 as well as the Plextor m3 Pro even beating them in many cases I'm really excited to see what is yet to come from this architecture because remember it took Intel to really squeeze the most out of the sand force SATA 3 controller so that took what six months a year something like that so Corsair and link' media have a lot of time to work on this and potentially squeeze even more out of it and the flash isn't going to be a bottleneck particularly on the GTX drive the GTX drive uses toggle Man which is the fastest op out there right now and I think that's pretty much it yeah we've almost wrapped up so another cool thing about this it uses a seven millimeter low-profile you know what I'm actually gonna go snag another drive just so that I can put them next to each other here and compare for you so what that means is that some of the smaller notebooks are ultra books these days that are using two and a half inch drives are lower profile than a standard drive so you can see here there's a two millimeter difference between a 9-mil drive and a seven mil drive Corsair has done this in order to enable compatibility no matter what kind of a device you are installing the drive in so with the included adapter you can install it in a three and a half inch bay a normal two and a half inch bay using the mounting screws on the bottom or the mounting screws on the side or even a slim two and a half inch bay due to the low profile design of the drive the state of three chip set of the SATA three connectors are at the back of the drive exactly where you'd expect them to be and other than that I guess all that remains now is waiting for the NCIX tek-tips SSD update where we feature this guy and tell you a little bit about the performance