Corsair Neutron GTX SSD Review (240GB): Link A Media Controller Tested

These are worrying times if you're a traditional PC component vendor. The desktop PC market has been outgrown by notebooks for the past several years, and we're on the cusp of seeing mainstream mobile PCs embrace proprietary component form factors and abandon end user upgradability altogether. I do have faith (or at least hope?) that we'll find some solution to the conflicting desires of upgradability and extreme portability without simply embracing disposable computing, but until then the world is going to keep getting more difficult for those who solely make components that go into a desktop case.

The transition of choice for the past few years was to build SSDs. While still not completely future proof, SSD upgrades are applicable to both desktop and conventional notebooks. Due to an outright failure of the traditional HDD vendors to get in early with solid state storage, smaller SSD vendors had a chance.

OCZ was one of the first to make the transition from PC component vendor to SSD manufacturer. OCZ eventually fully embraced its new life, shedding almost all of its former product categories with the exception of power supplies.

Corsair on the other hand was much more cautious. Not interested in diving headfirst into a market full of teething pains, Corsair held off on its first SSD introduction. Even after it entered the market, Corsair remained conservative when it came to adopting new controllers. Corsair shipped Samsung when it wasn't attractive and was late to the party with both Indilinx and SandForce. Only its forays into the Marvell world were somewhat unique, but mostly because companies without firmware teams tended to stay away from Marvell.

Being conservative kept Corsair out of trouble for the most part (the SandForce issues unfortunately impacted everyone), but it also did nothing to establish the company as a serious player in the SSD space. Realizing there's no chance of winning if you play it too safe, Corsair announced a new SSD based on a new controller at Computex earlier this summer.

The drive is the Neutron, and the controller maker? Link A Media Devices, aka LAMD (Corsair is a bit better at marketing). At the time, Link A Media wasn't very well known in the enthusiast community although the acquisition announcement from SK Hynix a few weeks later helped to change that.

Link_A_Media Devices and The LM87800 Controller

Despite our unfamiliarity with the company, LAMD has been around building storage controllers for the past 8 years. The LM87800 (the heart of Corsair's Neutron) isn't its first SSD controller, but previous designs have been mostly focused on the enterprise with no major consumer wins. The company is probably better known for its HDD controllers that were used in consumer drives from Toshiba in the past. The experience in both building consumer storage controllers and SSD controllers clearly paid off in the maturity of the LM87800. As its first foray into the consumer space, the LM87800 looks less like an experiment and more like an entrenched competitor.