Corsair P256 SSD – Faster than You Can Say Solid

In a short span of time, SSDs have near exponential growth in terms of performance, drive capacity, design and cost. The innovation from JMicron drive controllers SSDs’ to the more efficient and reliable drives using dedicated ARM processor cache chips is truly outstanding. Drives built on the Indilinx’s â€œbarefootâ€ platform are just one of the products of this innovation and they have outperformed other MLC based drive out there in terms of both sequential and random speeds. They are even considerably faster than conventional hard disk drives, a very noteworthy feat.
Corsair
Corsair took the development a notch higher with their Corsair P256 SSD. The P256 SSD uses Samsung designed platform on its ARM and cache enhanced SSD that bears some similarities with Indilinx architecture. Inside the drive’s metallic silver casing lie a total of sixteen pairs of Samsung 8GB MLC flash memory chips amounting to 256GB storage capacity. The notch higher comes in the form of their 128MB 166MHz DRAM cache for the drive, twice the amount of comparable SSD out there. Adding to the 128MB cache is a fast ARM processor capable of read speed up to 220MB/s and write speed up to 200MB/s. The same processor was used in similar products and resulted not only in stutter free SSD but faster performance as well. The same or even better feat can be expected from Corsair since they have the 128MB cache advantage. The cost is competitive as well at $669.99.