 "Corsair Neutron Series GTX 240GB Review")
Corsair is no stranger to the field of memory products and today, we have its flagship SSD series called Neutron Series GTX. This series uses the fastest NAND flash technology currently available – Toggle NAND, which is supposed to be faster than synchronous flash memory as well. Let’s see how it fares.
Design and Build
Unlike most SSDs, the Neutron Series GTX uses an aluminium chassis, which makes it extremely light compared to most SSDs in the market. The SSD uses a SATA 6Gb/s interface and is also backwards compatible with the older SATA 3Gb/s standard. The 2.5-inch form factor makes the Neutron Series GTX easy to install in both desktops and laptops. Corsair also includes a bracket in the box so it can be installed in a desktop as well.
Surprisingly lightweight
Rather than using the popular SandForce controller, the Neutron Series GTX uses Link_A_Media (LAMD) SATA 3 controller. This series is specially designed for data intensive work as it boasts of a pretty high random read and write speed of up to 90K IOPS. The drive also supports Windows 7 TRIM command. The Neutron Series GTX is available in two capacities in India – 120GB and 240GB. Next, let’s have a look at the performance.
Testbench
- Processor: Intel Core i7-2600k
- Memory: 8GB G.Skill DDR3-1866
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H
- Graphics card: AMD Radeon HD 6870
- Power supply: Corsair Silent Pro Gold 800W
- OS: Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit
SATA 6Gb/s connector
Performance
Our first test consisted of HDTach, where the Neutron Series GTX returned an impressive score of 413MB/s. The same was reflected in the SiSoft scores as well, which gave us a read speed of 456MB/s and a write speed of 435MB/s.
Very good write speeds
CrystalDiskMark was set up to read and write 500MB of data. The fastest that the Neutron GTX managed to achieve was a sequential write speed of 458MB/s, which is very impressive. In real world tests, writing multiple files to the SSD was done at a speed of 246MB/s while writing a sequential 2GB file was possible at 553MB/s. This is actual real world write speeds, which makes the Neutron GTX one of the fastest SSDs we’ve come across to date.
Verdict and Price in India
At a street price of Rs.18,200, the Corsair Neutron Series GTX 240GB SSD is not overly expensive when you consider the performance it delivers. Considering most 240GB SSDs hover around the 15K-16K price bracket, this pricing is not bad when given the performance. Yes, it’s still a lot of money, but then again, it’s not targeted at the everyday user in mind. If you don’t want to compromise on performance, then the Neutron Series GTX from Corsair is definitely worth checking out.
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