 Great Value |
| Review Date: August 7, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: Raymond Barbieri, Campbell, CA USA |
I recommend this for folks interested in a faster, quieter, more robust drive. Particularly if you are going to upgrade to windows 7 since windows 7 has the built-in support. Specifically, this type of drive has a limited number of writes. While the number of times it can write is HUGE, you don't want to write unnecessarily. For example, you DON'T want to defrag this drive. There is no access time so defrag would do nothing to improve performance. However, it would cause the drive to re-write files unnecessarily and shorten the life of the drive. Windows 7 automatically de-activates defrag for SSD's.
The drive has been working very well for me and the performance boost is VERY noticeable. Also because it doesn't get hot, the computer says cooler.
For those who understand the limitations I said above, this is a great bargain and you will be very happy with this drive. |
Great INITIAL Performance, But Buyer Beware!
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| Review Date: November 27, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: Richard L. Ross, ny, ny |
I'd assign 5 stars to this SSD based on present performance--it IS very fast, loaded Win 7 Ultimate in about 20 minutes etc. I was debating between purchasing this SSD vs. a Patriot 128GB Torqx--but I've have good experience with Corsair memory (recently purchased 8GB DDR3 1600 & far more DDR2 sticks than I can now possibly use since upgrading to Win 64-bit & using an Intel 1156 mobo, i7 860 chip etc.) My only initial concern was the scant 2-year warranty (10-year for the Patriot, lifetime for Corsair memory & 5-year for a Corsair TX 750W PSU). Through earlier customer posts I expected the simple SSD in a box with nothing else, & purchased an Icy Dock 2.5 to 3.5 converter for the desktop.
My main concern was the known issue of SSD deterioration in performance when it becomes fragmented--pretty much a given in any Win OS. So I wrote Corsair support suggesting SOME sort of guide, whether TRIM was supported, whether I should keep the paging file on a separate drive (I am). The non-responsive, but truly frightening reply, is verbatim: "I would suggest to use the drive as a secondary drive and only load it with applications you want to take advantage of the performance. If you have the performance drive from time to time leave your system on over night in idol [sic.] so the self healing can run. =)."
Truly insane advice since the biggest boost is using the SSD as the boot drive, & what option do you have if you install it on a notebook??? And 128GB (pre-Win) isn't going to support much for app intensive games & graphics where the GPU does most of the heavy lifting. No mention of TRIM support through a Win 7 firmware update or any other utility to "clean" the drive to prevent deterioration of performance other than this unspecified "self-healing" function built-in. So-called 100 year or so life expectancy--nonsense "statistic" (particularly under the circumstances)--with a 2-year warranty: how will this $370 or so piece of hardware perform in a year or so? And a guide WOULD be nice: this is a retail, not OEM, purchase. Buyer beware!
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extrememly good SSD
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| Review Date: June 15, 2010 |
| Reviewer's Name: Alex Daniels, Dallas TX |
After getting one of these for my laptop 6 months ago, I just bought a second P128 as part of a new system I'm building. The drive in my laptop (Win 7, Trim enabled) is still extremely fast and my new PC runs very quickly too.
Newer and slightly faster SSD controllers (sandstorm) are now coming out, but we're talking slight incremental improvements - you'd probably not notice any difference in real-world use. So if you can get one of these Samsung controlled drives cheaper, I'd still recommend getting one, since they have all the key features: Trim support, self-healing, 128mb controller cache etc. |
If you think one is fast, try two ...
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| Review Date: May 21, 2010 |
| Reviewer's Name: Elias Israel, Seattle, WA USA |
| Based on the other reviews here, I purchased two of these units and rigged them as a RAID-0 array in a Linux server. In a word: fast. Rock solid and error-free as well. I've had them running in this configuration for nearly a year now and haven't had even a single hiccup. The only limitation I can think of is that support for the TRIM command is somewhat limited in Linux installations. If you use this on a Windows 7 machine, you should have no trouble with that. |
Awesome!
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| Review Date: March 2, 2010 |
| Reviewer's Name: Sean M. Behm, San Francisco |
| End of story.. Finally fixed up the only bottle neck in my new Clocked i7-920 rig. A whole new beast. Wish I had more so I could throw a raid0 together...Anyone want buy me another? |
Really great on installation and boot-up.
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| Review Date: December 4, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: Robert A. Morin, Cleveland, OH, USA |
Wow, I'm really amazed by the speed of this drive right out of the box. It took nearly 15 or so minutes to install Win 7 from beginning to end, first off, and installing all the drivers and internet security necessities was like lightning flash, didn't even see the installation bar for that long on most of the component drivers. Just a shame that Samsung controllers don't support TRIM, but since I'm really using this for the OS drive, and probably for Steam, I really don't see any issue with not using TRIM at this point. Overall, it's certainly a significant performance over the 500GB Caviar that this replaced, even tho I'm still holding on to my 640GB WD Caviar Black for other apps that don't require the speed/performance boost that this SSD will provide.
As always, with an experimental technology like this, I will be updating through reviews on how this progresses along during this PC's lifespan. Here's the rest of my PC specs in case you're interested:
Antec 900 Steel ATX Case
Corsair HX620W Modular PSU
Gigabyte GA-MA790GPT-UD3H AM3 790GX Motherboard
AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition 3.2GHz Quad-Core
Sapphire ATI Radeon 1GB GDDR5 HD5850
8GB DDR3-1600 (6GB Patriot Viper + 2GB Mushkin Blackline)
LG 8x Blu-ray Burner (BH08)
Hauppauge HVR-1800 TV Tuner
D-Link Wireless-N Draft Adapter
This Corsair P128 SSD in an Icy Dock Converter
WD Caviar Black 640GB
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
I'm still gonna have to run all sorts of benchmarks on this, but Windows Performance Index gave my SSD a rating of 7.3, which is fantastic, and overall WPI rating is 7.2.
Great gaming system, if I do say so myself. Can't wait to put Steam on this, and see what type of gaming performance/load times this gives off. |
Fast and reliable.
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| Review Date: November 19, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: Abbe Rookswood, USA |
| I am using this SSD on a Lenovo Thinkpad and a HP business notebook pc. This drive is pretty fast and works upto my expectations. The read and write speeds are not as fast as claimed but are still fast enough to amuse you or are at least faster than a traditional hard drive. |
Simply amazing
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| Review Date: September 10, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: JSmuli, |
Just built my first computer. This drive is my main OS drive and it's amazingly fast. I am only buying SSDs from now on!
Update 3/23/2010:
[...]
^TRIM firmware update!!!!! |
Amazing speed increase!
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| Review Date: September 6, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: John A. Korchok, New York, NY |
| This is one of the best upgrades I've ever tried for a computer. I got it for a Mac Mini so I could use it as a server and not worry about disk failure, but the speed increase is phenomenal. Boot time is reduced to a few seconds. Totally worth the extra price. |
Laptop would not boot with this drive installed
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| Review Date: May 26, 2010 |
| Reviewer's Name: David Ellison, |
I ordered this as a second drive for an Asus G73JH laptop. The computer came with one hard disk and an open bay for a second drive. I found the computer would not boot with the Corsair P128 installed. If the drive was removed from the computer and attached to a USB adapter, the computer had no problems reading or writing to the drive. As soon as it was reinstalled in the drive bay, the computer wouldn't boot, there was just a flashing cursor after the post. The BIOS saw and identified the drive but nothing I could do would allow the computer to boot with the drive installed, including swapping the drive between bays, making BIOS changes, removing the hard disk and having only the SSD installed, etc. After a couple of days of trying, I gave up and I returned the Corsair drive.
Amazon's return policy is awesome, no questions, they sent UPS to pick up the drive at their expense, and quickly refunded my credit card. I'll now buy about anything from Amazon any time.
Next I bought an Intel 160GB SSD through Amazon, actually an Amazon vendor, Nathan. Anyway, the Intel SSD arrived quickly, was installed easily, and functions perfectly with no problems at all. I don't know if the problem was just with the Corsair drive I got or whether it is a problem or incompatibility with my particular computer. Others with the same computer have had no problems so I suspect is was a single defective drive. This raises the question of their quality control or testing. If they tested each drive it seems they should have picked up the problem. If they don't, well, they should. I chose Corsair because they are in the memory business. Looking back, they're in the RAM business. These drives don't use RAM.
Before buying this Corsair drive, it would be worthwhile to go to Corsair's site and go to their SSD support forum. Next research the Intel drives. There just don't seem to be problems with the Intel drives. Based on my experience I'd skip the Corsair in favor of one of the Intel SSD drives. |
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