Corsair P64 64GB SSD Review

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XP Start Up / Adobe CS3 Load Time

XP Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. For our tests the clock starts as soon as the system “beeps!” and stops when our Anti-Virus splash screen disappears. While all the other tests were run with a streamlined XP image this particular image is the test bed's “day to day” OS and it has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.

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Will this showing certainly is not bad at all. It seems the real world challenge of loading XP is negated in a large part by that extra large cache. The P64 still may not be as fast as the Indilinx SSDs but it certainly gives them a run for their money. It really looks like synthetic benchmarks aren't the Samsung controller's forté.

Adobe CS3 Load Time

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, but when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!

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Once again, any perceived failings highlighted by the various synthetic tests are not as pervasive (or as compelling) when dealing with real world challenges. As we saw in the OS load times, Indilinx may have won this round but the Corsair drive stuck clock to their heels throughout.

 

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Real World Data Transfers / Stutter Test

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 4.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containg 49 subfolders with a total 2108 files varying in length from 20mb to 1kb (1.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, timing each process individually to provide an approximate Read and Write performance. To then stress the dive even more we will then make a copy of the large file to another portion of the same drive and then repeat the process with the small one. This will test the drive to its limits as it will be reading and writing simultaneously. Here is what we found.

Since we have three charts above, let's break this down a bit for you. First of all, when copying large files from the P64, things are quite fast and we would say performance is in-line (considering margin of error) with the best of the best. On the other hand, the other SSDs get trounced by Corsair when it comes to transfering large files TO the drive.

When using smaller files, things are a bit less rosy but the P64 is still able to trounce the majority of HDDs we have tested in the past.

Where this drive really excells is when you want to transfer smaller files around the drive itself; say from folder to folder. This of course is due to that beefy 128MB cache which this drive so obviously needs. It is too bad it needs a crutch like that but any way you slice it IS a darn impressive showing.

Real World Stutters

Over a three day period we used the SSD as our main OS drive. During this period we did everything in our power to make the drive stutter. This is what we found out.

As expected, this drive simply does not stutter. Modern SSDs usually don’t stutter as much as the last generation and the fact the P64 uses a massive amount of onboard cache, it is actually very, very hard to induce even the smallest of stutters. If you are into heavy multitasking like downloading files and watching a Youtube video while running a video encoding program, then this drive may actually be a better choice for you than any other SSD we have reviewed to date.

 

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Value

Value

The term “Value” is such an amorphous term that it truly has different meanings for different people. For some a hard drive is only as good as its performance potential, for others it is how quiet or durable it is; for others still it’s how effective it is for its cost. We here at HWC try to provide as many answers as possible for the term “Value”. Hopefully by this point in the review people looking at performance potential will have a fairly good idea of what its Value is. For the “best bang for the buck” crowd we have included a chart below showing how much a give drive costs per GB . No consideration has been made for performance, “durability” or any other extraneous factors; this is just raw performance vs. monetary cost. All prices are based on the lowest price found in our Price Comparison engine at the time of their initial review.

At only two dollars and sixteen cents per GB this drive is actually perfect from a value point of view for those of you who are looking to get their feet wet in the SSD pool but aren't willing to take the plunge with a $300 product. What is even more amazing is that we are now seeing the cost per GB of SSDs gradually making its way down towards platter-based drives. In less than a year, we wouldn't be surprised to see budget friendly SSDs beating higher-end HDDs in this chart.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

If anything, this review of the Corsair P64 SSD is easily the best example of why we do both synthetic and real world testing on drives. If you skipped the rest of the review in order to read the conclusion, this is one review where you will want to go back and really take a close look at the differences between synthetic and actual usage testing.

To our way of thinking, the synthetic testing did what it is meant to do: highlight weakness in the controller and / or firmware. This is because most of the differences we saw between the Corsair's Samsung controller and the one from Indilinx would go totally unnoticed by a user. As such this demonstrated how synthetics can make a mountain of a mole hill when it comes to actual performance differences. Real world testing on the other hand is great at picking out issues that would affect a consumer's perception of a product but is a poor way to gauge twchnological differences . On their own, neither is an optimal benchmarking solution, when combined they give a good understanding of what exactly is going on at the basic level of a Solid State Drive.

In the case of the P64 if we had done ONLY synthetic tests we would now be slamming this harder and faster than some in the US have been slamming Canadian health care. In quite a few tests, the P64 lags behind the competition so badly it looks more like a last generation device rather than one from a newer generation. Granted, the P64 hung in there and did end up putting down some good results here and there but they were far from what we were expecting from this Samsung-based drive.

Conversely, if we had only run real world tests we would have singing the P64's praise by saying how close it is to the best of the best and how a simple firmware could put it head and shoulders above the competition. This too is an unrealistic view of the P64, albeit on the overly optimistic side. The fact of the matter is the Samsung controller which is the heart and soul of this device has lower latency but is a less than optimal design that heavily relies on its purposely oversized cache.

The real saving grace of this drive is its price / performance ratio. Granted, for many of us 64GB isn't quite enough space for a primary OS drive but if you don't have a huge number of files (HD videos and the like), it should be enough. The true cost per GB coupled with the overall real-world performance of the P64 really does give it an edge when compared to many of the other SSDs on the market today. At this point, we couldn't really ask more of Corsair considering they are providing a perfect upgrade path for HDD users with a sub-$150CAD price tag. In addition, that $150 price tag puts many last-gen JMicron-based SSDs to shame while offering significantly higher performance numbers.

The Corsair P64 may not be the highest performing drive on the market today when it comes to synthetic benchmarks but it makes for a perfect OS drive considering how well it did in our real world tests. This, coupled with a drool-worthy price means it takes home our Dam Good Value Award.



Pros:
- Great real world performance
- Great value
- Great warranty and support
- Upgradeable firmware w/ promise of TRIM for Win 7 release
- ITGC included in this firmware


Cons:
- Controller relies heavily on its large cache
- Last gen synthetic benchmark results
- Labeling issues

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