Corsair 256 GB Internal Solid State Drive

I just got this yesterday after a long weekend wait and let me tell you this thing rocks. And it rocks fast . I am going to give you a review on a perspective of real world use and not on benchmark with all the numbers, not yet anyways.

I bought this for my MacBook Pro unibody and it is the best upgrade I have ever done. The speed is just simply mind boggling. I was shocked on how fast everything is. I am not talking about user wishful thinking, bias opinion of the speed gain, I am talking about screaming fast, jaw dropping speed. To give you some ideas on how fast this thing boots up, with the original stock drive, I got out a stop watch and timed it (not very scientific here but it’ll do) and it took 1 minutes and 46 secs to cold boot the MacBook Pro into the desktop. With this new SSD, it took 22 seconds.

Applications loading is extremely fast as well. I mean, as soon as you hit the icon, the app is already fully loaded. I have a 8000 songs iTunes library plus about 40+ movies and 10 TV shows and iTunes loaded with lighting speed. It used to take at least a full minute to fully load iTunes, now it takes, literally 1 to 2 seconds (yes you read correct 1 to 2 secs to fully load iTunes).

I also have Photo collections with several thousands pics and it took, are you ready? It took 2.2 seconds to load the entire library. How cool is that?

Safari and FireFox are both stunning in loading speed with about 8 tabs of web pages.

My machine was running fairly cool with the old drive but when watching movies, the machine gets warm or sometimes hot to touch. With this SSD, I watched a full length 2 hour movie and the bottom of the MB Pro is steel cold. The fan never kicked on the entire movie. In fact I have not heard the fan since yesterday. To be fair, the MB Pro is so efficient that I never had any problem with heat or hear the fan noise but with the SSD drive, it is just dead quite. Very strange to use a completely noiseless and steel cold to the touch notebook.

About the drive. I did extensive research and found that this is one of the very best right now, watch out Intel (I think Intel still is the King). Before you get turned off my the name Corsair, it is really a Samsung drive with Samsung RAM chips and controller. Samsung has its own version of 256GB SSD but they only sell to OEM and not regular folks like you and me.

A tip:

Installation of the drive into MB Pro is very simple. Remove one screw that holds the drive and remove the 4 screws on the old drive (need special screw driver for these 4 screws). There is a video from OWC computing that shows exactly how to do it.

Painless upgrade:
I first put the SSD drive into an external USB enclosure. Downloaded SuperDuper, a free program to clone my old existing drive to the new SSD. Installed the SSD into MB Pro and boot it up. The first time booting up with SSD took a lot longer than what I stated earlier. I believe the OS needs to do some configuration for it first. After another reboot, the speed was astonishing.

I know that this is not cheap and I hear you. But if you want the joy of the greatest upgrade ever in the history of upgrading, this drive is the drive to get. Also, DO NOT go cheap on SSD drives. You get what you paid for. All SSDs are not created equal. Go do some research before buying but if you want to listen to someone who already did the research, read anything and everything on SSDs for years, then run, don’t walk and buy this awesome drive.

I have a Thinkpad X200s and ordered it with a 7200 rpm drive thinking it would make the machine “faster”. I have had it for several months and quite frankly have been disappointed with its speed. I was about to sell it on eBay when this drive came out. I figured I would try it in the X200s, it being a breeze to install before selling the Thinkpad. If it didn’t make the X200s faster, I would just put it into my desktop. Truth be told, I had low expectations as I already had a “fast” drive installed and assumed the slowness was a result of the other hardware in the X200s

Used Acronis, cloned my X200s, stuck the drive in and all I can say is AMAZING!!! What a difference. Anyone, I mean anyone wanting the best 2.5lb notebook should order the x200s with the cheapest drive and replace it with this amazing drive. It works like magic. I get about 30 minutes additional battery life with the 4 cell battery and can go over 10 hours with the 9 cell battery-all with much better performance and running the screen at full brightness.

Great product.

UPDATE:

Having sold my Macpro, I took my Intel SSD and placed it into my X200S and put the Corsair into my (old) Unibody 15″. I already had a fast drive in there (at least I thought). The Macbook Pro now flies. Faster than my external G-Tech Raid 0. When upgrading the Mac, make sure you have a TORX 6 screwdriver as the newer Unibodies have a mechanism that require Torx 6 screws to be removed from the original drive placed on the new one so it seats firmly.

Also if using on a Macbook Pro and intending to use it with Bootcamp, let me save you hours. First thing to do is reformat the drive booting off your restore CD/DVD. Select utilities, reformat and then go to “Partitions” in the utility and select 1 Mac partition and further select GUID. Then you can clone your old drive so that the new one can be used with Boot Camp. This took me hours to figure out.

This drive continues to amaze me.

This will be a short review.

This device is amazing in my Early 2008 MacBook Pro (2.66 Penryn + 4GB RAM + NVIDIA 512GB 9600GT). Everything is instantaneous — i.e., app launching is 2 to 20 times faster, web browsing in Safari is instantaneous, opening huge directories of files is instant and all icons appear instantly. My Boot time went from 2:20 (two minutes twenty) to less than 23 seconds. MS Word 2008 went from 2:35 to 17 seconds (I have a lot of fonts installed.) Photoshop launches in less than 5 seconds. Lightroom launches in less than 10 with over 20,000 photos in the library. Redraws are instant.

My entire system is lag-free, silent, and cool. This is absolutely the best upgrade you can get for any price. You could double or even triple the processor speed and not get this performance. It’s insane. insanely good.

Here is the short summary. I have bought a LOT of computer equipment in my time. This is the single GREATEST BOOST in speed I have experienced in years. If you are concerned if it’s worth it, from my vantage, this is a no brainer. You will not regret it. (Caveat, I got this drive for about $650–seems a bit pricy on amazon).

Why I got it. Well, the drive is the absolute biggest bottle neck on my computer system. I have a Mac Pro 4 core 2.66GHz with 24GB of RAM, and I never seem to max the processors out. The boot times always took a long time because I have about 25 applications automtacally launch on login. I also do a lot of email (huge email files, GBs of it) and surfing and writing. Nothing too taxing, but the system always felt like it was being held up by the disk drive, and in fact, it has. I even got a 10,000RPM 300GB velociraptor, which helped a bit over the previous 500GB 7200RPM seagate drive in making the system feel more snappy. But the system was still being held up by even the raptor drive.

Processors are so fast now, that loading programs and lots of small disk read/writes tend to be the biggest bottle neck on your computer.

Anyway, so I gave this drive a try. My system went from taking about 15min to boot to 1:30sec. Everything just appears, it doesn’t load so much as just snaps into place. I could give you a bunch of stats on how fast the drive reads/writes with synthetic benchmarks, and the numbers are impressive, but the REAL WORLD performance of this drive is amazing, and what counts.

Things that used to take long (hour or so) times (like the disc scan in Onyx) now take a few minutes. Rebuilding a database, which used to take an hour, now happens in 5 mintues (and iStat menus show real world write/read speed of 160MB/sec). Now, if you do video/audio work, this drive should be more than fast enough, however, it is possible that you could do better by just getting a couple of cheap drives and raiding them together–with that you can get very good sequential read/write throughput. But in the real world, outside of massive video acquisition and writes, it’s the file access latency that is the biggest bottleneck on system performance.

But it’s lack of latency that makes this drive amazing. There are no seek times. So when the system would have to read/write a zillion little files, with this drive, it just takes no time. What is even better, and very difficult to bench, is when you have several programs hitting the drive at the same time with lots of little file requests (think about loading 10 tabs in a browser while you’re doing a search in email through 25,000 emails, while searching through your 20,000 photo collection, while itunes is changing songs), the drive doesn’t blink. You’re not penalized by the latency of a physical drive head moving from one part of the system to the other responding to all those requests, and it just HAPPENS. No delay.

So now, my system is no longer being held up by the I/O. I’m pushing the CPUs more because a very very big bottleneck has been removed.

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Right now (and this is a fast changing segment with prices falling fast), for the size and performance of this drive, there is nothing that competes with it.

Not only do I highly recommend this drive, there is no going back. Going back and using any system without an SSD is an exercise in relative pain.

I replaced my standard hard drive with this SSD on my MacBook Pro. It took less than 10 minutes and my computer feels much faster, particularly during program startup. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer both my system and my other files to the SSD prior to flipping the drives, and my computer started up without problems and only a few preferences appeared to be lost.

Mac Users: It is likely that if you bought your computer more than a year ago, it came with a hard drive designed to operate at 1.5 Gigabit/second. This SSD can handle easily 3 Gigabit/s speed, and a software update should take care of the issue. Check the Serial-ATA hardware information under the About This Mac menu item and make sure your computer is set for 3 Gigabit (see below):

Vendor: NVidia
Product: MCP79 AHCI
Speed: 3 Gigabit <---------------------Check This After Software Update
Description: AHCI Version 1.20 Supported

If not, do not worry. Your next software update should fix this automatically if you are running OSX 10.4, 10.5 or 10.6. Not sure 10.3.9 supports this speed.

If you do not see a 3 Gigabit speed, and you have upgraded your operating system to its latest version, then you may have to take your computer into the Apple store and take advantage of the free consultation service (genius bar). When they ask you whether you installed this yourself, tell them you had it installed by a registered Apple technician so they dont read you the standard riot act about loss of warranty. Unless, of course, you enjoy confrontations with nerds.

Spending 8x the cost of a hard drive to buy a smaller drive for my macbook pro left me a bit concerned. Would it be worth it? When my boot time didn’t go to five seconds (remember the diagnostics take the same time), it left me concerned. Was I a fool? Probably, but that’s not the point.

Having lived with this thing for a week or two, I begin to understand: the machine doesn’t slow down. Running a compile in a VM doesn’t slow down firefox elsewhere or vice-versa. Today I was copying a VM to another drive and thought I’d check the restore time for a different machine. It was like nothing else was going on. The activity monitor showed disk reads of 185MB/second with the two disk heavy operations going on. Very impressive.

Most of my apps open on one bounce in the dock. The rest open in two. VMs start up fast; snapshots happen fast. Running two hefty VMs at the same time doesn’t lug and heat the machine as it once did. My compiles run significantly faster. I’m relieved.

Oh, and it’s nice to be able to close the laptop and move the thing immediately rather than waiting for the disk to finish and spin down.

I was able to nab a test unit of the Corsair P256 256gb SSD, Model CMFSSD-256GBG2D, for testing and decided to install it on my Mac Pro and compare it against a Western Digital Velociraptor (Model WD3000HLFS). The results were impressive. (ps. I used an ICY DOCK MB882SP-1S-1B to convert the 2.5″ SSD into a 3.5″ for mounting).

First of all I would like to say that the Icy Dock product is most impressive. You simply slip the 2.5″ drive in, after opening the hatch, and close it up..the drive slips into the connectors and is completely secured without using any screws etc.

The install was as simple as could be, put the SSD in the Icy Dock, mount the dock onto a Mac Pro disk plate and slide it in. Voila…start the MAC and the drive appears, after which you simply partition it (one partition in my case), and finally clone your system on to it. This is where my favorite software, Carbon Copy Cloner, comes in. The whole process of moving my entire system from the 300gb velociraptor to the SSD took about 25 minutes…I generally don’t store a lot of data so the total transfer was plus/minus 75GB.

Testing time….I left the system running on the velociraptor first and did some HD Speed Tests with the only utility I could find quickly, AJA System Test. AJA provides this software for free to compliment their video/audio software. I simply wanted to see if the cost of the SSD, $650+, justified its existence. I am sure there are better tests that can be run, but that being said I am sure you will find my results equally helpful.

The WD Velociraptor was the winner in this test due to write speeds being higher. Both drives were equivalent in the READ tests….. The conclusion of this test is that there is no benefit in spending well over $600 to get a SSD drive since a $230 Velociraptor does a better job and gives you a little more capacity. One third the cost and better performance….? I think the choice is clear. SSD is not ready for desktop machines, however it may be a suitable replacement for a laptop since it does not generate a lot of heat, use a lot of power, and above all does not have any moving parts.

A sampling of the results:
Legends: VR=VelociRaptor SSD=Corsair Drive

8gb Video 1080p – VR Read:227.4mb/s Write:228.5mb/s
SSD Read:226.2mb/s Write:185.5mb/s

1gb Video 1080p – VR Read:229.2mb/s Write:227.2mb/s
SSD Read:226.9mb/s Write:192.9mb/s

The above should give you a general idea of if you think the price for this drive is worth its while. That being said, I would definitely consider this for a laptop due to the lack of moving parts, less energy usage, and lack of heat. For a desktop, this may be on the expensive side when things like the Velociraptor exist….

Please drop a comment if you have any questions and or comments…I would love to discuss my findings in greater detail. The corsair still deserves a 5 star rating because it is a fast fast drive…the results may show slower write speeds, but in a laptop this thing will SCREAM!
Thanks.

I bought this drive to use in my ThinkPad T61, replacing a Seagate 7200.4 500GB drive. The Seagate drive I replaced is very fast as 2.5″ mechanical drives go, but this Corsair drive is noticeably faster. (Even though the T61 is limited to SATA I 1.5Gbps speed, so can’t take full advantage of the Corsair’s throughput.) My Windows 7 boot time was cut almost in half. Also full text searches in Outlook, which often took 10-15 seconds with other drives, are nearly instantaneous. Highly recommended.

Update: Over 4 months and still going strong. No problems and no noticeable slowdown. Corsair now has a new firmware version on their web site forum that supports TRIM with Windows 7. I’d recommend verifying that the drive you receive has the new firmware and, if not, upgrading the firmware before you begin using the drive.

I installed one of these in my Lenovo X61 tablet, and so far it’s been a great upgrade.

The Lenovo had been sort of borderline performance-wise. Running Vista Ultimate, it was slow to boot, and certain tasks just seemed to take forever. Although I generally like using the tablet instead of a conventional PC, I was nearly at the point of replacing the PC in order to get better performance. Instead, after working with an HP Mini 311 that also has a (smaller) SSD, I decided to try one in the Lenovo, and it’s made a world of difference.

As other posters mention, boot performance is dramatically better — about half what it used to be. I tend to use “hibernate” most of the time, and even that seems to complete in about half the time…I can go from hitting the power button to logging on in under 10 seconds this way. Many of the more complicated and longer-running tasks I do seem to benefit. I couldn’t be happier with the performance.

There are other benefits to this drive, beyond performance.

First, it’s lighter than the hard drive it replaces, so it’s like my laptop went on a diet. Half a pound saved on a system weighing 3-4 pounds is a noticeable improvement.

Second, I notice that I’m getting longer battery life. Part is that the drive uses less energy than a traditional drive, but part is also the performance boost. When running a long and complex task, the CPU can work harder for a shorter period of time, and thus spend more time in power-saving mode. I’d estimate that my battery life is about 20% more with the SSD.

Finally, one thing I never liked about the Lenovo tablet is that mine tended to run fairly hot. Not that you couldn’t touch it or anything, but if you work with the tablet by holding it in one hand while writing with the other, it would certainly be unconfortably warm after a while. With the SSD installed, this is much better…it still gets a bit warm, but not nearly so warm as it had been.

Highly recommended upgrade.

I have a Lenovo X201s that came with a fast 7,200 hard drive and an Intel i7 CPU. I bought this drive because I wanted to speed up boot and shut-down times, which were very acceptable but not anywhere near Mac performance. The drive installed without a hitch and fits perfectly into the slot. It may be an easier install on new ThinkPads because they come with a BIOS that supports solid state drives.

Now my laptop boots up in less than a minute and shuts down in less than 15 seconds. The PCMark Vantage 64 benchmark test (I have Windows 7 with 64 bit) comes out at around 10,000 (9,985 exactly), fully 50% faster than before installing the drive (6,873). The drive is silent and the fan almost never runs. Battery life is better. This is now one of the fastest, most stable laptops I’ve ever seen!