discussion Corsair Performance Pro 256GB SSD Review

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NON-TRIM Environment Testing

NON-TRIM Environment Testing

In many ways, Corsair’s Performance 3 should thrive in an environment that doesn’t support TRIM. To recreate this, we first modified our testbed so that it would not pass on the necessary cleaning commands. Meanwhile, to artificially induce a degrade state we ran eight hours of IOMeter set to 100% random, 100% write, 4k chunks of data at a 64 queue depth across the entire drive’s capacity. At the end of this test, the IOMeter file is deleted and the drive was then tested. This will replicate drive performance after extended heavy usage prior to any self maintenance routines kicking in and is indicated by the “Dirty” results below.

In order to allow each drive’s self-maintenance routines to kick in, we then wait 30 minutes (Dirty + 30 results) with the system at idle and rerun the tests.

To help give as both a detailed and practical overall picture of a given drive’s ability in this severe environment we have chosen two tests: one synthetic and the other more real world in nature.


Synthetic Results

Since reads are usually not greatly affected by a degraded state, for our synthetic non-trim test, we have chosen our standard sequential write test. By opting for this test and not one of our other shorter tests, the controller will not be able to compensate for being in a degraded state by using over-provisioning, caching or other similar buffers to hide the true state of the drive. To put it simply, by writing data across the entire drive, we will quickly see how big an impact this environment will have on them.

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Real World Results

For a real world application we have opted for our standard Vista load time test.

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These results really do speak volumes about the amount of performance Corsair has wrung from the Marvell controller. Not only is this drive able to recover from a degraded state faster than anything else we have seen before but it was also able to successfully mask its degraded state quite well. This means an end user will never actually "feel" like their Performance Pro is running slower than when it was brand new, even after a year of heavy usage. The extra cache space really does pay dividends and the payout is one bloody impressive drive for non-Trim environments.

 

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SATA 2 Performance

SATA 2 Performance

In a perfect world everyone investing in a new solid state drive would have access to a SATA 6Gb/s controller which could pass on the TRIM command. In reality not everyone has this and for many the decision comes down either giving up TRIM – never a good idea with most controllers – and running it off a secondary controller or taking a performance hit and running in SATA 2.0 mode.

These tests will consist of some of our real world and synthetic benchmarks run on our standard 1155 test-bed; but the drive will be attached to an SATA 2 port.

For synthetic we have opted for the newcomer to our charts: Anvil Storage Utilities Pro. For real world we have opted for our Adobe test. These two tests should give you a very good idea of the level of performance impact you can expect from running a modern SATA 6 drive in compatibility mode.

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While it may not be a clean sweep, this Marvell controller is able to retain more of its performance than most SAAT 6Gb/s drives when used in a SATA 2 environment.

It may retain more performance over time than most, but the SandForce high performance drives have one hell of a controller backing up their NAND so the end result is still weighted heavily in their favor. This of course simply underscores why synthetic results only tell half –at best – of the story.

In real world scenarios, the difference between the best SandForce has to offer and what this drive can do is so close that the results are well within the margin of error. In other words, the Corsair Performance Pro 256GB drive is very fast regardless of whether it is used in SATA 6Gb/s, SATA 3Gb/s or TRIM and non-TRIM environments.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

Corsair hasn’t had the luxury of releasing a massive SSD lineup like OCZ nor do they have the vast technical and financial resources of Intel but they’ve managed to capture our interest again and again. Their SSDs may not lead the competition in every category but through some savvy strategizing, Corsair made logical and highly appealing choices for their storage products. The Performance Pro 256GB does nothing but cement that opinion into our minds.

The Performance Pro certainly isn’t meant to be a chart topping drive so it came as more than a surprise to see numbers that nearly equaled or in some rarer cases even topped the OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS. More importantly, it handily beat the main competitor -Crucial’s excellent M4- in most of our benchmarks. When paired up with sufficient cache and Toggle Mode NAND modules, the Marvell controller can really put on a show as it demonstrated numerous times. Honestly, we’d love to see what this thing can do when all of its NAND channels are populated.

The Performance Pro simply shines in non-TRIM environments due to its automatic, built in idle garbage collection feature. But what differentiates it from past ITGC-equipped drives is an ability to effectively hide this extra processing workload. Through the use of the large RAM buffer, Corsair has finally dialed in their ITGC routine so it keeps the drive fast over time while running transparently in the background without taking performance out at the knees. This combined with the Pro’s overall performance makes it possibly the best option of anyone who can’t rely on TRIM, particularly those who want to run a RAID configuration.

Corsair really has something here, particularly when it comes to price. This isn’t the least expensive SSD on the market (far from it actually) but it can easily be found for under $400 and doesn’t come with all of the latent issues SandForce-based drives have been experiencing as of late. If Corsair ever manages to bring the cost down to the M4’s level, Crucial will have a lot to worry about. By combining high performance, a TRIM-agnostic garbage collection feature and the adaptability for numerous environments, the Performance Pro is one of the best all-round drives we’ve seen in a while. The only real issue for some will be the current lack of higher capacity models.

Pros:

- Great non-Trim performance
- Excellent TRIM environment performance
- Massive onboard cache
- Impressive ITGC which gets the delicate act of balancing performance vs. degraded state potential right
- Uses Toggle Mode NAND instead of ONFi NAND
- Corsair backed warranty

Cons:

- Still only 8 NAND flash modules even though there is technically room for 16
- Corsair fails to make it crystal clear what the differences between the Pro and its predecessor

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