Corsair SSD S128 Solid State Drive (NCIX Tech Tips #24)

[Elio17]

very good

[taimooralibukhari]

Can any body tell me which one is best Sdd under 100$

[patratiyaa]

bla bla bla bla, bla bla bla, more info твою мать

[drmurda]

do ssds really last longer?..... hmm, I read review after review saying lots are DOA or die within a month... would like to go with ssd, but maybe 4x raptors in raid 0 would be better? hrmmm

[TheCharrigan]

@drmurda ssd still win in the speed term bc of its 0 access time. Just try to buy really reliable ssd's such as Crucial M4, Intel's or Kingston's. The sata3 Sandforce controller ssd's are quite irregular so better avoid them.

[drmurda]

@TheCharrigan yah, im using two ADATA SSDs now. 10 months ago was before I built my $2200 gaming rig, and didint want to gamble on new tech.... but I ended up going for it :S

[windycloud23]

lol @ the keyboard pile

[monkeyman1140]

This guy needs to stop drinking coffee.

[chronofusion]

g skill phoenix pro ssd's blow this thing out of the water. sorry but it's true. and although Corsair is a good company. I dont see them replying to newgg.com reviews about any serious problems they have encountered unlike G skill and OCZ. also instead of a Raid solution..hell just get either a Revodrive or save up more for Ocz's HSDL Ibis package

[Delcaroll]

Hm raid5 solution looks promising :-

[deluxedookie]

im running 7200rpm and photoshop cs4 takes a second to open, do i really need to cut down that time?

[darkcg79]

@deluxedookie: no, you shoud fix your stop watcher.

[deluxedookie]

@darkcg79

i dont use a stop watch, i have strong PC. splash screen blinks then photoshop is open.

[p00pindas00p]

(part #1) Linus, you need to review your review. You're paying what, $300 for an SSD of that capacity. For the same price, how many 1TB hard drives could you RAID5 together? What's the cheaper solution per MB/sec? What has the better capacity? Which is more reliable?

[p00pindas00p]

@p00pindas00p (part #2) For the same price, you can get about 8 cheap 1TB hard drives. You need a RAID controller, so take 4 of those out of the equation and get yourself a good hardware RAID controller and a separate PSU to power all of this. This turns out to be better value, because you're getting 4TB instead of 128GB.

[p00pindas00p]

@p00pindas00p (part #3) (... well, technically 3TB because of the control bytes).

As I'm sure you're well aware, on these larger drives the first 200GB is the fastest. 100MB/sec isn't uncommon for cheap drives these days. RAID5 4 of these drives together and you suddenly get read speeds of 300MB/sec. Starting to look promising, Linus?

[p00pindas00p]

@p00pindas00p (part #4) Consider the fact that when you lose one of those drives, you're not going to immediately lose data because of the RAID5 parity bits. You can just throw a new drive in and have a coffee while the array repairs itself. What happens if, for some reason, your SSD dies though? (and yes, that happened to me 2 months after recieving it, 3 times in a row)...

[p00pindas00p]

@p00pindas00p (part #5, le fin) Now, when comparing an SSD to an equally costly RAID5 of winchester drives, what's the one other significant benefit? YOU CAN DEFRAGMENT! You might also wish to note that the write speed of an SSD may be more significantly impacted when the drive is fragmented than the read speed is. It depends how the cache memory is used ;)

[mrdanny87]

@p00pindas00p Raid 5 is horrendously slow for read and writing data. To get equiv SSD speeds you really need at least 8 high performance 7200rpm drives, potentially enterprise or sas and a lsi 9240, or lsi 9260.

[bustermk2]

It lasts a hundred years and yet only has warranty for 2 ... do I detect a lack of faith here?

[netkongen]

Gayhole

[madzane94]

Wont be surprised if the camera man has plans to jump him :P

[manel0319]

lies,ssd are not reliable,cause the flash memory only can be written a limited number of times.

also i neve lost data fram a hdd,and if you did use raid 1 and you wont lose any date

[jaycob619]

Would anyone with an SSD be using UAC?

[lamhatpho]

when do you think prices will drop more and by how much?

[mehmet24a]

Never buy a SSD-drive. This is why: Flash-memory drives have limited lifetimes and will often wear out after 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 P/E cycles (wiki).

[SKYNETDUO]

@mehmet24a

is that the same for a ipod touch??

[TheExcentrik]

We need updated Tech Tip on SSD

[JASON9948]

Is SSDs use flash memory? then it is unreliable after an eclectic problem

[rysterf8]

He's a gay virgin.

._.

[magtataho7]

Stop shaking that SSD like crazy, gaylord

[jrsaysbiteme]

Awesome review.

[audigex]

Yes (usually)

[iOzznialt]

Yes , a regular SSD can go up to 300 mb/s.

[frontier1701]

My SSD drive crapped out and I lost 4GB of data, so dont give me that "reliability" line of crap!!!

[FriedChicken4Life]

ur right, SSD is NOT, i repeat NOT 'reliable'

There is a lot of disgruntled ssd owners about.

ssd is not a good option for reliablity just yet, maybe in the future

[LLOYD19851012]

so would you say i shoud not get a ssd drive. and buy a rapitor 10,000rpm?

[FriedChicken4Life]

IMO yes, I would.

But, even a good fast Barracuda would be an excellent choice. cheaper, and quiet.

SSD's are a bit risky, and raptors are a bit noisy.

I'd personally, and have, gone with a barracuda

but always research!

[peterinfamilyguy]

Pretty unneccesary for a desktop, i mean, you wont hear anything since the desktop itself is under the speakers, so you basically dont hear anything, HDD drives works as fine, aint faster, but still works!

Im going with HDD ON DESKTOPS! Not for laptops, then this is huge

[FeralNoctorn]

No body should switch to SS because of sounds their HD makes..

For Computer enthusiasts, bench-markers, and gamers, SPEED is everything. Without the delay of physical moving parts, solid-state is a much more efficient way to go.

SS drives are good for loading OS, or for storing data that you have high value for (pictures, documents, videos) without the worry of a moving part malfunctioning and corrupting data.

So unless your a gamer, OC'er, or using SS for backup, this is irrelevant for you.

[peterinfamilyguy]

AGREED!

[aerobios]

Or someone Like my dad who looses money when waiting for programs to load :D

[FeralNoctorn]

precisely :)

[nawaz2kx]

does anyone know when the prices of SSD's will come down?

[NeoNoggie]

They're 1/4th the price they were a year and a half ago, wait another year and a half and they'll probobly be half the price or less than they are now =0

[nawaz2kx]

gay thing is they are actually cheaper to manufacture than hard drives. only reason why it costs so much is because they are better than disk drives.

[genbowl]

I'm going to put in 2 of these in raid 0. Store my OS, games, etc. Then use a 500gb HD to back it up

[carbonunit]

Actually corsair has faster versions, I ordered a Crucial 128gb, I plan on replacing a 3x raptor 74gb raid 0 setup with this SSD, when the price drops on these SSD's I plan on replaces all my platter drives, and have one large redundant platter drive for all my file stores....I figure in 5 years platter drive will only be used as storage devices, in 10 years they will probably be extinct

[grey2fox]

That's what I'm planning to do, buy something like a 30gb SSD and put the OS in it while a conventional HDD for all the games in the world. When they do go down in prices and improve, I'll buy a bigger 1 for the rest but the prices now and the sizes don't justify a purchase.

[simplybornhuman]

this guy is insanely hot. i hope he doesn't go catch some of the wrong ssd's hey.

[JustinR19]

100 YEAR LIFE? I dont want some weirdo looking at my hard earned porn 100 years from now!!!

[chronofusion]

@JustinR19 lol. then you better do like the guys at Kingston did with theirs * google the videos* blow it up with dynamite or shot three arrows through the circuit board of the ssd itself.lol. I dont blame ya man. You'll see on those videos that two or three out of the five or six different wacko torture tests Kingston guys put the ssd's through..the ssd STILL booted into win 7. there's probably more to it than I noticed though. cheers

[irulethe70s]

dont defrag a SSD as it slows it down

[santeidi]

why?

[irulethe70s]

it slows it down

[nawaz2kx]

also corrupts the drive

[irulethe70s]

if i get it for my macbook avoid running defrag scrapts

[unowiel]

Thanks for the review!

[XxGlamisDunerxX]

says the chink

[leexgx]

i have one of these things and they are very fast (response time not data rate)

[siralexu]

soon as they make them cheaper and bigger im pulling the plug on the old turn table's

[jayxtreme6]

forever too load?!?!?!? I have a single core desktop with a 160gb seagate drive (IDE interface) and photoshop cs3 soesnt take THAT long to open, and office word takes like 3 seconds.

[danielnorin1]

Office word in 3 seconds wow that is far to long to load! I load it in less then 1 sec with the OCZ 30 gig!

[cesarsony124]

wat i would do is put in a ssd and put windows xp media center on it which i will use that ssd not for storage but for the os and i would get probably a 500gb hard drive and use it for storage

[WorldWideRomance]

but you can just install it yourself.

[Xenios123]

So i dont need a second HDD.? Just the Solid State Drive? Help me

[Nixk490]

yes you can just have a ssd

[TheBirdman99]

depends if you can fit all your data on it, otherwise install the os on it, and your files on a regular hdd

[R08M]

just keep the OS in a ssd.....keep EVERYTHING else on other drives....like one just for games...one just for music and one just for movies......it works reallly fast

[Greeb17]

he looks like he has to pee

[thebrakko]

hahahahahah

[korgpadude]

@Greeb17 lol

[ibiruyonap]

What about simultaneous reads/writes? Some drives can hardly handle 5-10 at the same time, so the system freezes for a bit.

[crazykid1222]

i like the random-ness

[AmzooO]

does this SSD work for macbook anyone? please reply

[WWWJenya]

"Tom's hardware" magazine says that OCZ Technology SSD drives are much better accounted for better power consumption which is important for notebooks for the same performance (or slightly better).

[h2h2h2h2]

Wow, this Video is on the front page of the Corsair site.

[DSLCowboy]

Sorry but the Reviewers are Noobs here. Reason for 150MB/s read in HDTune is, that the MLC was fresh and Cells never written before and so Wearleveling doesnt work correct. This results are like for garbage !!

Format the SSD first time with full formating, not fast formating, This is absolutly necassery for correct results !! And that a wonder if you do it, you have arround 99 MB/s read and thats real and correct.

[NCIXcom]

Actually this is 100% correct. I was not aware of this particular aspect of SSD technology. It seems there are a lot of rumors flying out there about SSDs "slowing down over time" and I suspect that at least some of it is due to the fact that they do read MUCH faster until they've methodically had every cell written to.

The drive does a little over 90MB/s reads now, but writes were (obviously) unaffected.

[NCIXcom]

Sorry for double post, but I thought I should bring up that the actual Windows installation was done on a full format, not a quick format, so the speed improvements that were observed were not affected by the "fresh" cells.

The benchmarks were performed on an unformatted drive on account of HD Tune not allowing write tests on a partitioned drive.

[lillen300]

@NCIXcom Well there are adapters for 2.5 inch ssd so they get the form factor as an ssd and you stack two ssd ones in one 3,5 inch dock and you get the storage capacity of two

[ssssroryssss2]

lol he looks like he needs the toilet :D

[jordinyc]

Long MTBF and low power drain are really good perks, but the reason people are going to get SSD's is speed. Crazy speed. Like Jackie Chan doing cocaine on a bullet train speed. I think Corsair knows that, they're just trying to avoid disappointing people, since the technology isn't quite what you would expect it to be.

I wonder if they'll put activity LED's on future models. ^_^

[RedTigerBlood]

I just love this show, its better than any other I have seen thus far.

[iman10000]

I've been waiting about 5 years for this stuff... Solid state is so much better.

I can't wait for the price to drop like a rock so I can get a few :D

[cainathin]

I think this is great technology, now all they need is silent cooling on power and cpu's ant we can have perfectly silent desktop computers with all the power and speed of noisy ones.

[RoryM07]

What program did he use to bench the drive?

I wanna see what my drive can do lol :D

Thanks!

[NCIXcom]

HD Tune

[SamsungHeineken]

Get those prices down and I'm all over these!

[JoffyMusic]

16 GIGS will hold a proper Vista installation.

[SamsungHeineken]

Well, he did say "proper" installation. If you can fit all your programs/files in a few Gb, why are you bothering with Vista?

[op2rules]

The point was just saying for the same price as a 16gb ssd you can get a 250gb hdd and you will be able to hold a lot more data

[YousefAB]

but you are forgetting the difference between the two HDD's, the SSD has by far better advantages.

[SantaClause49]

Not to price.

A SSD is like 5$ per gb, to like what, 0.10 per gb :\

[fibertech9]

What about the cons? Some have low write cycles. Get an SLC not an MLC. Do not defragment.

[LookItsRiceCake]

I can see for laptops where a fast, redundant RAID array starts to get really impractical, these drives could be great.

Obvious, given that these drives are almost entirely in the 2.5" form factor.

Desktops, obviously, will coast on large cheap arrays for quite some time.

[pinoypuro]

Nice product BUT around $400? LMAO. 100+ year life expectancy...... who cares. I will get 4x500GB as back-up instead!

[kumbo]

no shit. 400 bucks...give me a break.

[Gromitdog1]

my understanding is ssd is much higher power consumption

[sloppymeattaco]

SSD has much less power consumption, no moving parts means less power needed. Think of these as just really large, fast USB keys.

[Gromitdog1]

Toms hardware did a test and concluded that ssd was higher power consumption. In theory ssd should be lower as 0 power consumption in idle mode.

[sloppymeattaco]

Wow really? Link

[Gromitdog1]

Can't post links but google: The SSD Power Consumption Hoax from toms hardware.

[NCIXcom]

Actually if it's the article I"m thinking of, it was debunked. The problem was that the system using an SSD's battery ran out faster, but it wasn't because the SSD uses more power, it was because the fast access to the data allowed the RAM and CPU to process more data. That means they were doing more work and consuming more power!

The drive itself does not consume more power than a magnetic drive.

[YousefAB]

He is right, there is no way that the SSD takes more power than a normal HDD, it wont even make sense, SSD is like a memory card, are you telling me that the memory card uses more power than a normal HDD? No-Way.

[YousefAB]

I don't know how you figure that, or what is the relation between what I said and what you said.

[goldenmunky]

Good job Linus! Keep up the good work!

[Epiphyte]

Useful, but comparisons would be good: When showing and talking about the performance of the SSD, providing a frame of reference in terms of the similar numbers for some popular hard disks would have been really good.

Also, the presenter looked like he had to go to the washroom or something the way he kept shifting back and forth.

[youBigLoser]

he's one of the best presenter i've seen. easy to understand and clear to the points. ncix has found a great guy to present their products. no wonder ncix has made so big, almost everyone in north america knows this small company in vancouver.

[kilimats02]

very poor performance on this SSD

[KriegsMaschine]

Hehe, always the same groove pr0n music. I dunno if its me but in HD it seemed to be "low fps" + with Linus on speed drug he was looking very strange.

It's stupid from Corsair to show spec as 72Mb if it goes up to 150. People won't buy it if they think it really is 72. I think the greatest feature of SSD is that results are constant, unlike HDD that gets slower and slower really quickly. If I get an SSD it's nothing under 128Gb for sure and never over 100$.

[silverstonewebcam]

office doesnt take forever to load ( 2007), unless u have a 10 yr old comp

[gooderthanyou]

LOL at anyone who uses UAC

[kanechart]

Linus he surfs a lot of bad sites :P

[igob8a]

I use UAC on 7 and it's perfectly fine.

[Pinoyako11705]

Really, who didn't disable the UAC on Vista? That's th first thing I ever did when I put my Vista in.

[TonkatrainHONKHONK]

lol i loved the pile of keyboards =P

I find it funny that theese drives are rated for 100+ years but all have a very shot warrenty though...

[farkaland]

good presentation, although i am not fond of all that moving around =)

[spiritedguy]

Very good video, best of the few I have seen, I enjoyed the presenter. Also good for a mild chuckle. Would have been nice to mention current price point.

[WiseWeeabo]

this guy doing the review seems pretty good, compared to the other ppl doing reviews around here

ACTUAL benchmarks with pictures, instead of just reading the *feature* list and calling that a review like most of the shit here on youtube :P

[cobalt120]

SSD FDs are showing promise.

They still have the flimsy plastic built sata & power connections. :(

Limiting best performance to Vista or future windows version does not bode well.

Debatable access reliablility when restoring a partition from outside of windows (norton ghost, or acronis backup).

Hope the price drops soon on the 128MB SSD Flash drive.

[Justchuck69]

he said a standard vista installation which requires 15 gb

Delus1on77 you must have used vlite to modify your installation

win 7 ask for 20 gb

[tijean066]

Is the guy on crack or what ?? He's moving like crazy...or is has something in his pants ???

He should be more relax more in his video....sound like a salesman !

[Delus1on77]

all i have to say is 16gb can hold a dual boot vista/xp installation. i have tryed

[1981z28camaro]

shouldn't it carry at least a 90 year warranty? lol like come on, when I'm 112, and my SSD goes bye bye, I'm gonna want a replacement....

I guess by then these 128 SSD's will be like crap "Hey, wanna watch this piece of shit melt? who's got the blow torch?

[NothernSpecter]

Nice review, i will concider geting a SSD, since my 500GB WD drive is starting to get slow-.-

[snicksim]

good video, SSD rocks

[lloxton]

Great Video.

[agafaba]

Defenately large improvements from a few years ago, looking forward to these.

Also another point, these do very well in RAID.

[backflipUK]

darn.. wish i new about these before i bought my Samsung SpinPoint F1 750GB SATA-II 32MB :/

[randomdrifter]

Photoshop takes 3 seconds on my 7200.3 Seagate 320GB 2.5" machine though, doesn't take that long.

That said though, that SSD's performance is good! =D

At CAD$405 w/o tax though, the price for the drive is still its biggest turn off at present, but once the drive hits below 100 in an estimated 1-2 years, it'll definitely be a good buy.

[NCIXcom]

Hmm... Maybe depends on the version you have. I'm still using an old copy of CS2 that I have and it was MUCH faster (at least 5 seconds faster) on the SSD system than on my Samsung F1 750GB

[randomdrifter]

Hmm, I'd think the specs factor has things to do with it.

I'm running things on a Sony VGN-FW140D, and my Photoshop version is CS3.

Would imagine that the older Photoshops take less time to boot, but system specs, fragmentation levels and RAM would contribute a lot to the Photoshop boot up time I guess (on a non SSD, seeks times).

My older Acer Aspire 1692WLMi laptop (1.73GHz Pentium M, 2GB PC2-4200 RAM, Samsung 160GB HM160HC) takes 12 seconds to boot CS3 versus the 3-4 seconds on the FW140D.

[smartwarlord]

nice