Corsair Neutron XT (240GB, 480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Phison S10 Debuts

Final Words

From the benchmark results, the S10 is a fair successor to Phison's S8 platform. However, in terms of overall performance against the compeition, it is difficult to be impressed. Despite the added processing power in the controller, the expectation of a big increase in performance over the S8 was a little misguided, and as it stands the S10 and Neutron XT are more mid-market products.

One result to point out is the performance consistency. One purpose of the extra CPU cores is to increase performance in steady-state by handling the flash management, but that does not seem to be happening as efficiently as one might hope. If this was a value-market drive, the consistency would be okay since the drive would be subject to mostly light workloads. The Neutron branding is a higher end product, which puts the performance directly against the branding. As the branding is marketed for enthusiasts and professionals, the consistency in harsher IO workloads does matter. Phison has told me that they have a more consistent firmware in development that is geared more towards the prosumer market, but it is possible that it will also find its way into high-end client drives (although I don't know if Corsair has any plans of adopting that firmware). 

UPDATE: Corsair told me that while the samples we received are already production-level candidates, discussions about firmware updates are already ongoing with Phison. In other words, there is a chance that the final retail units will carry a newer firmware, but if that happens I will of course retest the drive and provide an update.

Aside from performance, the high idle power consumption due to the lack of slumber power support limits the S10's and thus the Neutron XT's market to desktop users. Mobile users are more geared towards low powered devices and there are drives with proper power management support available. As I mentioned on the previous page, the slumber power states will be implemented to the firmware in about a month, although it will be difficult to estimate when it will arrive to the Neutron XT as the new firmware must go through Corsair's validation as well before a public release. 

As pricing has not been announced yet, it's hard to draw any final conclusions. The Neutron branding hints that it is aimed at the high-end market, but on the other hand Corsair must be competitive in price to provide any advantage over the other high-end drives (especially SanDisk's Extreme Pro and Samsung's 850 Pro). I don't want to speculate too much on the pricing or whether the Neutron XT is positioned competitively because we are only a couple of weeks away from the launch.

All in all, while it is an improvement over the S8, the S10 (and by extension, the Neutron XT) lacks a 'wow' factor that would really help it stand out from the rest. The TLC NAND support in the S10 is certainly a nice feature, but I don't want to praise the feature until I see a drive shipping with the S10 and TLC NAND. The lack of increase in consistency despite the increase in CPU power is one point of concern that Phison needs to address to have a competitive product at the higher end of the market. That being said, it is difficult for any SATA 6Gbps platform to provide a massive advantage over another because of the link throughput and AHCI software stack limitations. We are also still at least a couple of quarters away from seeing more PCIe solutions in the market. Once that happens, the doors for differentiation open up again.