14 DAY TRIAL // There has been quite a bit of movement on the solid-state-storage front over the past few months, especially now that SSDs have started catching up to HDDs, at least remotely, in terms of capacity. This progress, as well as the higher reliability, the TRIM command in Windows 7 and the incredibly higher speeds that the Flash memory achieves made them more eligible on both the enterprise market and the consumer market, compared with last year at least. To build on this growing popularity, Corsair has decided to expand its Nova Series of SSDs with two new models.
The newcomers come to complete both ends of the series, in terms of capacity. The lower capacity unit has 32GB of storage space, whereas the larger one has 256GB. They are both enabled by the Indilinx barefoot SSD controller, which lets the drives reach maximum read and write speeds far above what HDDs, aided by their platter-spinning ways, can hope to ever achieve.
To be more specific, the drives can read hundreds of megabytes at once. Of course, being SSDs, the actual rates are directly proportional to the capacities. As such, the 32GB Nova is slower, reading data at 195MB/s and writing at 75MB/s.
These rates are already good enough, but they are dwarfed by those of the 256GB model. This unit has maximum read/write speeds of 250MB/s and 195MB/s, respectively.
Obviously, since SSD performance gradually decreases over time, because “deleted” data ends up cluttering the drive, the two SSDs are designed with full support for the aforementioned TRIM command, which constantly erases said “deleted” sectors. Another benefit that Corsair implemented is multi-drive RAID configuration support. Finally, the two devices should become available immediately, are backed by a two-year, limited warranty and come with complete customer support via Tech Support Express, forum, email and telephone.