Corsair Neutron GTX SSD Review (240GB): Link A Media Controller Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 20, 2012 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Corsair
- Neutron
- Link a Media
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.
SSD DRAM Size Comparison | |||||
Drive | Controller | DRAM Size | DRAM Speed | ||
Corsair Neutron GTX | LAMD LM87800 | 256MB | DDR2-800 | ||
Crucial m4 | Marvell 88SS9174 | 256MB | DDR3-667 | ||
Intel SSD 320 | Intel X25-M G3 | 64MB | SDR-166 | ||
Intel SSD 520 | SandForce SF-2281 | 0MB | - | ||
OCZ Vertex 4 | Indilinx Everest 2 | 512MB/1GB | DDR3-800 | ||
Samsung SSD 830 | Samsung PM830 | 256MB | DDR2-800 |
The LM87800's spare area can be configured in firmware. Corsair opted to set aside ~13% of the total NAND as spare area for bad block replacement, wear leveling, recycling and general garbage collection. This gives the Neutron GTX the same capacity targets as most SandForce based drives (e.g. 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, 960GB). The relationship between NAND capacity, advertised capacity and what you see in your OS as usable space is in the table below:
Corsair Neutron GTX Capacity | |||||
Advertised Capacity | Total NAND | User Addressible Space | Spare Area | ||
Corsair Neutron GTX 120GB | 128 GiB | 111.7 GiB | 12.7% | ||
Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB | 256 GiB | 223.5 GiB | 12.7% | ||
Corsair Neutron GTX 480GB | 512 GiB | 447.0 GiB | 12.7% |
The LM87800 doesn't employ any real time compression or data deduplication algorithms and thus behaves like a traditional SSD controller. There's no support for hardware based encryption. LAMD claims to integrate DSP-like functionality (a la Anobit?) to help increase endurance,
The controller supports eight NAND channels and a 6Gbps SATA interface, which are par for the course. There's not much else I know about the controller's architecture unfortunately. These companies tend to keep quiet about what they're doing internally as to avoid any potential patent challenges or give anyone a competitive advantage. Much of the secret sauce here is obviously in the firmware, the hardware is simply an enabler.
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name99 - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
"Load power consumption is much more competitive. It's not what I would consider low, but it's not unreasonably high either."Well I guess we all have different opinions...
IMHO the only number that matters is whether the maximum power draw (usually sequential writes) is below 2.5W. Below 2.5W and you know you can use it safely in a USB2 enclosure. Above that and it will appear to work but fail at random times.
You might think you only want to use this drive INSIDE a laptop. OK, if you are SURE of that. My experience is that drives move with time from one location to another, and it sucks if I have to throw them away when they're still good.
You might think you will only want to use this drive in a USB 3 enclosure (and now you have 4.5W to play with). OK.... but again life's going to suck if for some reason you want to use that drive on a USB2 machine.
IMHO SSD architects are behaving like Pentium4 architects, doing what they like while ignoring power issues. This is a path that does not end well. We'll already at the point where nobody gives a fsck about the difference between a streaming rate of 300MB/s and 330 MB/s --- but people DO care about battery life, and they do care about devices that are gratuitously heating up their rooms and warming their palms.
At some point point, these architects need to grow up and follow Intel down the path of speed at reasonable power, not speed at any power whatsoever.
KAlmquist - Monday, August 27, 2012 - link
Yes, it is disappointed to see SSD designs get worse over time in terms of power consumption. The Samsung 830 does a good job of holding down power usage when idle, but can draw more than the 4.5W limit of USB 3.0 when busy.dishayu - Wednesday, August 22, 2012 - link
Can we have the Plextor M5 Pro review please? I can't make up my mind if i should just pick up a Samsung 830 or wait for M5 Pro.Mr Perfect - Wednesday, August 22, 2012 - link
I know this sounds archaic, but could you throw a mechanical laptop drive into the power charts? At this point in time I honestly have no idea if these SSDs even have a power advantage over a modern spinner. It's hard to tell if a "bad" SSD is still better then a good mechanical, battery wise.Visual - Monday, August 27, 2012 - link
Unfortunately I do not have any media that I can link. ;)killabee_me - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
Hi Anand,The test results didn't make it into Anandtech SSD Bench for some reason.
Could you make sure they get there?
Thanks.