Corsair Neutron GTX SSD Review (240GB): Link A Media Controller Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 20, 2012 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Corsair
- Neutron
- Link a Media
Performance Over Time & TRIM
Over time SSDs can get into a fairly fragmented state, with pages distributed randomly all over the LBA range. TRIM and the naturally sequential nature of much client IO can help clean this up by forcing blocks to be recycled and as a result become less fragmented. Leaving as much free space as possible on your drive helps keep performance high (20% is a good number to shoot for), but it's always good to see how bad things can get before the GC/TRIM routines have a chance to operate. As always I filled all user addressible LBAs with data, wrote enough random data to the drive to fill the spare area and then some, then ran a single HD Tach pass to visualize how slow things got:
Performance drops pretty low but it's not terrible at above 50MB/s. The flat line around 230MB/s both at the starting and higher LBAs is a bit peculiar, but we could just be seeing some pinning of data that the controller thinks is important for whatever reason. Read performance is also pretty heavily impacted, being cut in more than half once the drive is in this state. A quick format of the drive triggers TRIM which restores performance to new:
The Neutron GTX is reasonably resilient but behaves like a normal SSD in that if you throw a lot of random writes at it, you will see steady state performance well below 100MB/s. Most client usage models, particularly if you leave enough free space on the drive (I like to shoot for ~20% free space), shouldn't get into this state even after years of use.
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qwertymac93 - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
Has more to do with SATA than NAND.SlyNine - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
Thats Sata 3 limits. Not NAND flash.surt - Wednesday, August 22, 2012 - link
NAND can go faster. That's why products like the fusionio go to 2Gbps or higher. 500 is just the most you can get across a single sata3 connector.B3an - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
When will the Plextor M5 Pro review be up?I've seen some other reviews popping up and it's looking very good, maybe the best SSD around, but these other reviews are not as detailed as Anandtech reviews.
Kristian Vättö - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
Some odd behavior with the M5 Pro came up which has delayed the review a bit. I'll try to have it ready in the next few days, then posting it is up to Anand.B3an - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
Thanks Kristian... and i hope you mention what this odd behaviour was in the review.Movieman420 - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
Too soon for a review...a pre-view maybe Anand?M5P will do for now tho..;)
jwcalla - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
At this point it seems that there is little, if any, real-world difference in the latest gen drives of similar NAND.seapeople - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
Agreed. Crazy how everyone and his brother now has a blazing fast SSD out there that puts the x25-g2 to shame. Just three years ago we were happy when an SSD controller came out that didn't have stuttering issues.maximumGPU - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
Agree with some of the previous comments, we need a comparison with the latest Plextor M5 pro.Btw Is the M5 pro the first to use Marvell's new controller, or is it the vertex 4?