Geoff Gasior over at the Tech Report just posted his review of some of the newest solid state drives. Included in his round up are the Corsair Nova V128, the Kingston SDDNow V+ 128GB Drive, the Plextor PX-128M1S and the Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue drive.
These are all drives which have come within the last few months and they represent a diverse range of solid state driver controllers. The Kingston uses a controller from Toshiba, the Plextor uses the Marvell Da Vinci, and the Western Digital uses the Jmicron JMF612. Because the solid state drive performance is heavily dependent on the controller these tests give us an indication of how other future drives using those controllers will fair. And how did they fare?
Well, with the exception of the Corsair Nova V128 drive – which uses an already established Indilinx controller – the answer is “not good.” All of the solid state drives in this round-up were tested against the class leader, the Intel X-25M. The Kingston SSDNow V+ and the Western Digital SiliconEdge both showed serious performance issues in random read/write tests. They were in fact so bad that in some tests they were slower than mechanical hard drives. Now that just stinks. The Plextor was also just plain slow, and it wasn’t just in certain tests – in pretty much every benchmark the Plextor drive was much slower than any of the other solid state drives.
The Corsair Nova, however, came out looking pretty damn good. It was often behind the Intel X-25M, but managed to beat the X-25M is a few IOmeter tests and file copy tests. It provides a viable alternative to the Intel. But this was also a bit of a disappointment because it isn’t really a surprise. Indilinx based drives have been doing well for awhile now. It would have been nice to see a new controller debut which could keep up. In any case, go to the Tech Report for the in-depth review.
Source: The Tech Report
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