Anyone have Corsair 256GB Performance Pro SSD? Feedback Please

I'm in a hunt for an SSD for my new Lenovo W520. I was zeroing on Intel 520 SSD before I came across the Corsair 256GB Performance Pro SSD Performance Series? Pro 256GB SSD - Performance Series Pro - SSD

Any personal experience?

Thanks

 

No, but from the reviews i've read it looks like a pretty solid drive. It has the same marvell controller as the Intel 510 and Crucial M4.

 

Thanks,

I've seen a lot of reviews and that's why I'm stuck in the middle.

Should I go for the corsair or Intel 520?

I'm sure of the reliabilityof the Intel as I've one (X25-M) but what about the reliability of the corsair?

 

FWIW, the Intel 520 is nothing like the X series of SSDs. And there are a number of us who are withholding judgment of the Intel 520 until we see more real-world data. We're not saying it's bad, mind you, but rather, not saying anything at all until we see reports on how it performs in the field.

For more info, you can see the entire thread from page 1, or pick up the thread here - http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...sd-520-includes-sandforce-23.html#post8299579

 

Why not shoot for the cheaper, equally reliable, equally fast Samsung 830?

 

I have the 256 GB Performance Pro. I don't really know what to say, other than it works as advertised and hasn't given me any problems. Do you have any specific questions?

BTW, one important factor in deciding whether or not you get this drive is that it will probably never have a firmware upgrade. This is good in the sense that it means Corsair put a lot of effort into ensuring that the initial shipping firmware is perfect so you don't have to worry about the hassle of firmware flashing later down the road, but also bad in the sense that it will never see an M4 style performance boost.

Finally, the Plextor PX-M2P is essentially the same drive. If you can find that for significantly cheaper, you should take that into account too.

 

it depends on where you live, in europe performance pro is same price as plextor m3s and about 10% cheaper than 830 and 520

I like mine m4 better than my 830 and thats why m4 is in work rig and 830 at home for gaming and watching movies

also corsairs and plextors are even faster than m4 in real life.

 

Hi @Peon, How fast is Performance Pro compared to other SSDs? I'm looking for write speed and reliabilty as my main usage is VMWare Images

Why do you prefer your M4 to samsung 830?

 

i'm a java developer and that means using lots of very small files (<4kb), and in that environment m4 is much faster than 830, 830 has lousy higher qd writing, it is basically same as qd1, while reading is ok, but still limited by writes on same drive. M4 doesn't have that problem, marvell controller is able to saturate its write limit under qd 3 or more.

Difference in time is not that big especially compared to 2.5" 7200hdd, but m4 is faster under heavy duty workload.

 

Thanks ivan_cro,

I'm a SharePoint(c#) developer and in the same situation as you. I use alot of VMs to do my development which has Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2008, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

And these consume alot of memory around 10GB RAM and CPU resources.

I'm a novice when it comes to SSD, but from what I'm using it for, do you think M4 will benefit it more than other SSDs including 830?

Thanks

 

I guess this is ok because you started this topic but this is entirely off topic

it depends for example what kind of vm-s are you using, for example, when I was playing with esxi few years back, i noticed that disks perform lot better with small files in vm environment than when directly connected to a host. Sequential speeds weren't as high as they should have been. That's probably because datastore is basically one big file and writing in it was probably sequential. That's at least a conclusion i got to, didn't bother to research it in depth though.

I have no clue how hardware is functioning with vm-s today when there is ability for vms to more directly access hardware (vt-d), as I don't use them for years now. Our db is on dedicated server, and the rest of development tools on physical hosts each of us have.

What I can say for sure is that for db work on non production environments almost all ssds will perform about the same. But for your app server deployment, you would want to have higher queue write speed if you have large project.

My deployment lasts about 5 minutes with compiling (if we can call it that with java ), and on hdd that was more than 12 minutes (cpu time remains the same, only difference is disk).

Edit:
the thing is, whichever higher end ssd you get, you'll be VERY happy compared to your hdd, the rest are so small differences that we could probably categorize them as negligible. What remains is how reliable the drive is, and marvells and samsungs are top notch in that department.

 

Thanks ivan,

I'll be buying an SSD next week preferably 512GB, but got confused with a lot of choices out there.

Trying to make up my mind on which one to buy and looking for a reson on why I shouldn't buy a particular model. The more I visit this forum, the more confused I'm. I'll just close my eyes and buy the M4. That if I don't change my mind by then.

 

why did you change your mind about corsair perf. pro? It's better than m4 in every way, it has same controller and better memory. Plextors m2p, m3s and m3p are basically same as that corsair.

imho, those are the best performing drives around. Intel 520 is very nice, but it's sandforce based (minus is potential reliability) and little slower with noncompressible data, and too expensive, and third option would be samsung 830, that has issues with writing small files on higher qd.

There is no perfect ssd, however, these are all very good ones.

Interesting thing is, according to google.co.uk -> shopping, plextors and corsair are cheaper than m4

Do think about if you really need ssd that large, mine are both 128 gigs, 256 would alow me to store things that are not necessary on them, but price difference was too steep for me. You could probably go easily for 256gb one, but 512gb might be throwing away your money. Just a thought

 

After reading so many reviews and blogs, I've decided to buy the Corsair Performance Pro 256gb SSD.

Thanks everyone

 

Good choice I've got one too and it's speedy. A bit faster than my last Patriot Wildfire. I also have the 830 and they perform the same although my 830 is the 512 one. 4KQ32 speeds the Performance Pro wins. This thing is like an M4 on steroids!

 

Sorry for my ignorance, what does 4KQ32 mean? Or What does 4KQ32 represent\do for a normal user?

 

that's queue depth test with small files, for regular home user it doesn't mean much, as qd rarely exceeds 3 or 4, however, as you said you use vm's and theyre probably going to try to access disk at the same time and that's where it should prove useful to you for your development activities.

For home users even if one would limit ssd to qd1, difference would be negligible as ssds are in worst case scenarios tens of times faster than hdds, and that speed also ensures qd to stay low almost all the time.

 

Here are some benchmarks if anyone wants to take a look, performed on my M17x R3 with a few easy tweaks: