Corsair Neutron 240GB SSD Review – Link_A_Media Controller

The Nucleus of the Neutron

Corsair threw us a curveball on this one. The normal screws found on an SSD to open it were absent although there’s a void sticker which usually covers one or more of the screws. When this was removed – no screws! It’s actually just held together with tabs indented on the case so a little pry magic did the trick.

Once open, the PCB was held by three screws in a triangular pattern.

On the initial side of the PCB we find eight NAND modules along with a single cache chip.

The MLC NAND Flash employed is Micron in manufacture being synchronous and 25nm in architecture. Each are 16GB in density resulting in a total physical capacity of 265GB.

On the flip side, we find the remaining eight NAND chips along with another cache and the controller smack in the middle.

The DDR2 cache is not labeled as such but is Samsung, part number K4T1G08QF which appears to us to be each 128MB (1Gb) in density for 256MB total on board.

The Link_A_Media Devices (LAMD) LM87800 controller is fresh on the scene and by all accounts is very promising as it should be with it being their flagship controller. The 6Gbps capable controller is capable of some impressive performance numbers in terms of raw reads but in terms of writes, it doesn’t employ the same compression technology that we see with SandForce controllers so on paper their numbers aren’t quite as hot. It leverages what they term eBoost technology to improve drive endurance through proprietary “adaptive signal estimation techniques” and also takes care of error correction duties which becomes more critical as NAND architecture shrinks.