Introduction

Solid state drives have gotten a bad wrap in a lot of places - some of the criticism is well deserved but in today's world avoiding just a few of the bad apple SSDs will provide you with an experience much better than some might have you believe.  We are of course talking about the early JMicron-based drives that plagued users with application stuttering and performance issues making the additional cost per GB of SSDs seem wildly out of proportion with reality. 

Much has changed since then - new players have entered the market and newer flash controllers have been released that don't have those same issues.  No, the world isn't perfect, but it's getting a lot closer. 

The Corsair SSD

Corsair's first entry into the world of solid state drives is really a modest initial offering.  The only option they offer is a 128GB model based on the most recent Samsung controller and configuration.  (Note: the OCZ Summit engineering sample we tested uses a future Samsung controller.)

The Corsair 128GB SSD is the same design and configuration as the other SSDs - 2.5" form factor with a single descriptive label. 

Inside the casing we find the Samsung controller, a small bit of cache (32MB) and the flash memory chips that add up to the capacity of 128GB.

Corsair's drive uses double stacked flash memory to essentially increase capacity without increasing complexity to the controller chip.