Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB RAID 0 TRIM SSD Review Storage   Page 1

Reviewer: Jon Coulter Article Publish Date: 9/27/2012

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

 

Right on the heels of our first complete RAID 0 TRIM review we have for you another. This time we will be taking a close look at Corsair’s new flagship model the Neutron GTX in a two drive array run off of a Z77 Chipset which means we will have TRIM functioning within our array. The Neutron GTX is an exciting new drive that is an IOPS monster. In fact the Neutron GTX has the best performance of any drive we have tested when dealing with incompressible writes at high queue depth levels. The Neutron GTX is a drive designed to dish out great performance regardless of whether or not the data it’s digesting is compressible which is of high importance to certain consumers.

 

The Neutron series of drives have at their hearts a new controller the Link_A_Media Devices (LAMD) SATA III 6Gb/s SSD controller. Corsair has paired the dual ARM cored  LM87800 Amber FPU with 24nm Toshiba Toggle Mode Flash Memory. The Amber Flash Processing Unit features a technology called eBoost that claims to bring enterprise type endurance and reliability to the consumer level. The Amber FPU can be variably overprovisioned and Corsair has chosen to use 13% OP space on the Neutrons which will help to keep performance and endurance at optimal levels. The Amber FPU uses 8 NAND channels capable of supporting both ONFi flash as well as Toggle flash.

 

We will now be doing our RAID 0 reviews with data on array or fill testing to show how a 2 drive array will perform with various amounts of data on the array and more importantly how well TRIM functions within the array or if its functioning at all. Simply stated with TRIM our 2 drive arrays now function exactly the same as a single drive does except at least twice as fast and double the capacity.

 

There are three prerequisites for functioning RAID 0 TRIM. 1) You must be running an Intel Z77 board, processor doesn’t matter you can use any 1155 socket CPU. 2) You must have an 11 series OROM as part of your motherboards BIOS which should come built in on any Z77 board. 3) You must be running an 11 series Intel RST storage driver. Here is the driver we recommend you use: (click here) choose the third one down and install in Windows. This driver came out after the drives for this review were benched but we have tested it on other drives and it’s the best RST driver so far and that’s why we are recommending you use it.

 

A single Neutron GTX (click here) managed to set some records for our lab and proved itself a contender for the performance crown. Now that we have functioning RAID 0 TRIM we are anxious to see what the GTX is capable of in RAID 0.