Corsair P256 256GB MLC Solid State Drive Review

HD Tach v3.0.4.0

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

Benchmark Results: The Corsair SMDSSD-256GBG2D 256GB Solid State Drive has great read and write speeds as seen in the benchmark results above. The drive starts out and runs at an average 196.6MB/s read and 165.6MB/s write, which is very fast. Since SSDs don’t have a platter they can maintain these incredible speeds at any position on the drive. The burst speed of this drive was also very nice as it had a 234.1MB/s burst score as seen in the results shown above.

Comparison Chart: When comparing the Corsair P256 to other popular 2.5″ notebook hard drives you can see that it dominates the four other drives that we have benchmarked on the same test system with the Intel ICH10R south bridge. Even the Super Talent MasterDrive OX 64GB SSD didn’t stand a chance and was destroyed by the Corsair P256 SSD in the read and write tests. In fact, the Corsair P256 had an average write speed that was 280% greater than the speeds seen on the Super Talent OX 64GB that just came out in the winter of 2008. The only HD Tach RW performance benchmark that the Corsair P256 SSD didn’t win was the burst speed test, and to that the Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB hard drive gets the spoils of victory. The results of HD Tach’s CPU utilization test don’t mean much as the application has a +/- 2% margin of error and the results of the benchmark range between 0-3%, which doesn’t represent a significant difference.