Corsair, global manufacturer of highly regarded computer memory, has only recently embarked into the manufacturing of a new product lineup – solid state drives. In fact, the SSD market is currently dominated by popular manufacturers such as OCZ, G.Skill, Patriot and others, while having virtually no representation from traditional storage manufacturers like Seagate or Western Digital. That said, electronic solid state drives are far closer in similarity to random access memory (RAM) then they are to the mechanical made   hard drives.

Corsair released 128GB and 64GB SSD models earlier this year, and was met with great enthusiasm by consumers. The company has kept a great track record, with quality memory products and arguably some of the top power supplies on the market. The release of the new P256 256GB model, keeps them on the playing field with  other manufacturers who have released 256GB drives, currently the largest publically available SSD’s.

“The Corsair Storage Solutions P256 delivers the best computing experience of any single storage drive available today,” said John Beekley, VP of Applications Engineering at Corsair, “Using the P256 results in immediate and dramatic improvements in system startup and shutdown, game level loading, application startup, and many other everyday tasks. Additionally, the P256 is more durable and reliable than hard disk drives, and has been shown in the Corsair Labs to provide up to 25% longer battery life in portable computers.”

The drive is powered by a Samsung controller, which is said to mimic the PB22-J SSD drive that Samsung offers to OEM’s but is not available in the retail channels. It boasts a maximum of 220MB/sec read speeds and write speeds to a max of 200MB/sec, competing on par with the claims of speeds from competitors.  It also features a modest 128MB cache. The drive is currently being shipped to authorized retail partners where the average price point is around $779 CAD or $699 USD and comes with a 2 year warranty.

The competition between SSD manufacturer’s is heating up, with OCZ one of the more popular brands and offering a wide range of product lineups – the Solid,Core, Apex and Vertex and soon to be Summit series – to suit what ever the consumers needs. Intel too has made headlines with their X25-E lineup capturing the crown as the best performing SSD on the market. With Corsair and other competition enetering the market, and the price R&D and materials dropping, we can only hope that the enormously high cost of SSD devices drops to a more reasonable level.