Corsair Reactor R60 SSD Review

The Corsair Reactor SSD is poised to be set into a very crowded section of the market. Priced in the $130 range, it has to compete with the likes of the OCZ Agility, Vertex, and even others within the Corsair Extreme Series. Using the JMF612 controller from JMicron with 128MB of DDR2 for stutter free performance, the Corsair Reactor CSSD-R60GB2-BRKT is built to right all of the wrongs from the original JMF601 and JMF602 controllers.

The Corsair Reactor R60 is able to perform well in its price range with 250MB/s sequential read speed and a 110MB/s sequential write. The big question is does it suffer the same stuttering issues as the original drives with JMicron controllers? Hopefully, the 128MB of DDR2 cache will help, but only thorough testing will actually show if this major problem has finally been overcome.

Although only acting as a major player in the enthusiast market for a couple of years, the SSD storage device has really changed the way people have looked at computing. Boot times of 10-15 seconds or less are realistic. Now SSD's are finally starting to enter mainstream, and Corsair is attempting to capture the market with its well priced Reactor Series.

Why Use a Solid State Drive?

Computers have quickly become more and more powerful with CPU's growing ability to perform more than 100Gflop/s and GPU's speeding past the 2Tflop/s range. On the other hand, traditional storage has become larger but not enough to compete up with the speeds of other technologies. The reason for this is that traditional spinning disc storage still relies on physical media, and because physical media uses a moving head to read and write, speed is lost.

Where the SSD really stands out is the access times and I/O performance. Hard Drives areal density has been increasing which does help with sequential read and write, but random speeds, access times, and I/O performance are still incredibly slow. The sequential read speeds of even the fastest 15,000 RPM hard disk maxes out at 195MBp/s. A 15,000 RPM hard disk is only looking at an average of 356 I/O operations per second with a access time of 5.6 ms. Compare these with some of the best SSD which can do upwards of 50,000 I/O operation per second with a access time under 0.1 ms.

About Corsair Memory, Inc.

Founded in 1994, Corsair specializes in premium, high-performance peripherals and components for personal computers. Corsair's award-winning products are the delight of the world's most demanding hardware enthusiasts.

Corsair has been a leader in the design and manufacture of high-speed modules since 1994. Our focus has always been on supporting the special demands of mission-critical servers and high-end workstations, as well as the performance demands of extreme gamers. While maintaining this core focus, in recent years, we've also brought our expertise, technology leadership and legendary quality and reliability to memory and other technology products for the more mainstream consumer.

With more high-speed experience than anyone in the industry, we know the importance of design features like tightly-controlled trace lengths, controlled impedances, clock trace design, unbroken power and ground planes, and selectively plated gold. Corsair has developed an industry-wide reputation for quality, compatibility and performance.

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