14 DAY TRIAL // The Nova and Reactor Series of solid state drives were introduced by Corsair at the beginning of the month and it seems that the company was quick to finish up preparations. The memory, storage and PSU specialist has revealed that these two product lines have already been made available and are ready to impress with their very high read and write speeds. The drives are four in total, operate on the SATA 3.0 Gbps interface, have an MTBF of one million hours and are designed with MLC NAND Flash chips.
The Nova Series SSDs are created with the Indilinx BarefooT controller, which provides the storage units with a cache memory of 64MB. The line is, at least for now, composed of two models, namely one with 64GB of storage and one with 128GB. These two devices both have a maximum read speed of 270MB/s. This transfer rate is significantly superior to that of not just hard drives, but also certain other existing SSDs. As for writing, the maximum speed is, predictably, lower for the drive with smaller capacity. As such, the 64GB Nova SSD can reach 130MB/s, whereas the 128GB version can achieve 190MB/s.
The Reactor Series solid state drives also come in two storage capacities, namely 60GB and 120GB. They support USB 2.0 besides SATA and, instead of using the Indilinx BarefooT, are based on the JMicron JMF612 controller that comes with 128MB of DDR2 cache. This memory enables a performance free of stutter. As for actual performance figures, read speeds can be of up to 250MB/s, whereas write speeds can reach up to 170MB/s (in the case of the 120GB drive) and 110MB/s for the 60GB.
Corsair has priced its Reactor Series 60GB and 120GB SSDs at 151 Euro and 290 Euro, respectively, whereas the Nova devices carry tags of 158 Euro for the 64GB and of 300 Euro for the 128GB Nova Series solid state drives. The drives are all offered with a two-year warranty and have already been made available for purchase through Corsair's authorized resellers and distributors.