Corsair XTi

Is there still a place for SATA 3 SSDs?

PRICE $ 299 corsair.com

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days it’s almost impossible to find a laptop that ships with a standard SATA 3 SSD – all of the major manufacturers have moved to the M.2 format. However, that’s as much for size reasons (M.2 drives are much smaller than standard SATA 3 drives) as it is for speed. Still, we’re rapidly seeing M.2 and now NVMe hitting the desktop market, so for Corsair to release a SATA 3 drive is a brave move. Some might even say foolish.

The biggest change here is a doubling in onboard DRAM to improve performance, yet it’s not a massive increase. Corsair claims 560MB/ sec of sequential read speeds, while sequential write drops slightly to 540MBs. Random read and write IOPs also increase slightly, to 100,000 reads and 90,000 writes – so overall we’re looking at about a 10 to 15% percent improvement in performance. Not a huge boost by any means, but enough to make a difference during your dayto-day use.

This SSD is based around Phison’s S10 controller, but Corsair has doubled the DRAM in a bid to reach these faster speeds. This controller struggles when it comes to handling small-block random performance, but Corsair claims increasing the amount of DRAM helps with the consistency of transfer speeds. We’ve actually seen other manufacturers actually dropping the amount of DRAM to help keep costs down, so this is a refreshing change. It’s an 8-channel controller, and in the 480GB version all eight-channels are in use – if you buy the smallest version, it drops to 4-channels, and performance suffers as a result. Corsair has turned to Toshiba to deliver the flash memory used within, with 512gb of 15nm MLC delivering a usable space of 480GB.

A 5 year warranty or 320 TBW (Terrabytes Written) guarantee is included, expiring whichever of the two comes first. If you’re looking for a coloured SSD to match your case then you’re completely out of luck, as the Neutron XTi only comes in red, red, and – get reddy for it– red. Apparently Corsair is now using colour schemes to represent performance. Either that or the company is secretly staffed by hardcore Communists.

Our first benchmark, CrystalDiskMark showed a speedy sequential read speed of 560MB/s and a similarly impressive 543MB/sec. However, our favourite test for SSDs is Anvil’s Storage Utilities, which highlighted a slight but notable

With M.2 and NVMe hitting desktops, it’s brave of Corsair to release a SATA 3 drive... some might say foolish

weakness – IOPs performance.

This drive hit 66000 read and 81000 write, which isn’t quite in the same league as the likes of the Samsung 850 Pro, a year-old drive that seems to do no wrong.

Corsair has definitely delivered some exceptional sequential read performance, but it trails when it comes to random IOPs by quite a large margin. Considering the Samsung 850 Pro 512GB is the same price but significantly faster at random IOPs, it remains our drive of choice for now. BENNETT RING