14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives used to only focus on performance, because they never had any hopes of matching HDDs in terms of raw capacity. This is still largely the case of course, but there are other facets that storage device makers are paying attention to as well, as Corsair has again shown.
Corsair has formally launched a new line of solid state drives, although it did it while staying quite laconic in regards to certain aspects.
For example, it chose not to say much in terms of pricing, even though this is the first thing many people look at when browsing solid state drives.
Then again, the new Neutron XT high-performance SSDs, being high-end products, are guaranteed to cost a lot compared to not only HDDs but “normal” SSDs as well.
So maybe it's for the best that the prices were kept under wraps. No point in scaring potential customers away from the onset.
The performance of the Corsair Neutron XT SSD series
Powered by a Phison controller, there are three models in the collection, with capacities of 240 GB, 480 GB and 960 GB, respectively. That's quite a lot for an SSD. Many SSD lines stay at 512 GB or below.
On that note, performance is usually contingent on capacity as well, but when we're dealing with drives of 200 GB or more the disparity can be negligible.
As far as we can tell, it is the opposite for the Corsair Neutron XT, as the 240 GB solid state drive is expected to read data at up to 564 MB/s and write it at 547 MB/s, but the 480 GB and 960 GB drives are believed to reach 562 MB/s and 542 MB/s, respectively.
At least all of them have the same write endurance: 124 TB. That means that you can write and rewrite data on them repeatedly until the cumulative capacity is of 124 TB before performance degradation starts to set in.
A decrease in overall performance is an inherent flaw of NAND Flash memory, owing to the limited number of write cycles. The TRIM command in Windows 7 and above mitigates it somewhat, but it's not a perfect measure.
As an added benefit, the SSD Toolbox lets you manually optimize the performance of the drive, update firmware, tweak overprovisioning, clone, erase, and monitor SMART status.
The security of the Corsair Neutron XT SSD series
It's quite high, the highest you can find on consumer and business storage devices of this type really: 256-bit AES encryption and TCG Opal 2.0 compliance.
Between that and the SmartFlush feature (which pushed data into the flash immediately, nearly eliminating chance for data loss because of a power failure), you should be able to keep your files safe and healthy no matter what happens.
