From the benchmark results, the S10 is a fair successor to Phison's S8 platform. However, in terms of overall performance against the compeition, it is difficult to be impressed. Despite the added processing power in the controller, the expectation of a big increase in performance over the S8 was a little misguided, and as it stands the S10 and Neutron XT are more mid-market products. One result to point out is the performance consistency. One purpose of the extra CPU cores is to increase performance in steady-state by handling the flash management, but that does not seem to be happening as efficiently as one might hope. If this was a value-market drive, the consistency would be okay since the drive would be subject to mostly light workloads. The Neutron branding is a higher end product, which puts the performance directly against the branding. As the branding is marketed for enthusiasts and professionals, the consistency in harsher IO workloads does matter. Phison has told me that they have a more consistent firmware in development that is geared more towards the prosumer market, but it is possible that it will also find its way into high-end client drives (although I don't know if Corsair has any plans of adopting that firmware). UPDATE: Corsair told me that while the samples we received are already production-level candidates, discussions about firmware updates are already ongoing with Phison. In other words, there is a chance that the final retail units will carry a newer firmware, but if that happens I will of course retest the drive and provide an update. Aside from performance, the high idle power consumption due to the lack of slumber power support limits the S10's and thus the Neutron XT's market to desktop users. Mobile users are more geared towards low powered devices and there are drives with proper power management support available. As I mentioned on the previous page, the slumber power states will be implemented to the firmware in about a month, although it will be difficult to estimate when it will arrive to the Neutron XT as the new firmware must go through Corsair's validation as well before a public release. As pricing has not been announced yet, it's hard to draw any final conclusions. The Neutron branding hints that it is aimed at the high-end market, but on the other hand Corsair must be competitive in price to provide any advantage over the other high-end drives (especially SanDisk's Extreme Pro and Samsung's 850 Pro). I don't want to speculate too much on the pricing or whether the Neutron XT is positioned competitively because we are only a couple of weeks away from the launch. All in all, while it is an improvement over the S8, the S10 (and by extension, the Neutron XT) lacks a 'wow' factor that would really help it stand out from the rest. The TLC NAND support in the S10 is certainly a nice feature, but I don't want to praise the feature until I see a drive shipping with the S10 and TLC NAND. The lack of increase in consistency despite the increase in CPU power is one point of concern that Phison needs to address to have a competitive product at the higher end of the market. That being said, it is difficult for any SATA 6Gbps platform to provide a massive advantage over another because of the link throughput and AHCI software stack limitations. We are also still at least a couple of quarters away from seeing more PCIe solutions in the market. Once that happens, the doors for differentiation open up again. ... of my bigger set of games (Battlefield and the like. ) When I connected everything and restarted my ... Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2016 I recently bought this SSD for my computer to serve as an SSD for storage of my bigger set of games (Battlefield and the like.) When I connected everything and restarted my computer, my bios would NOT detect it, nor does device manager. I also tried a few alternative means to detect it with no avail, so I sent it back for a new one. I had the same problem with the new one, and thought it may just be my sata cables and other cable, so I replaced them accordingly, with still no avail. Until I find a way to actually make this SSD work instead of being DOA, I cannot recommend higher then a 1 star. This Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to the below mentioned manufacturers for their support in our project. Our choice of components is very narrow, in that, we choose only what we believe to be among the best available and links are provided to each that will assist in hardware pricing and availability, should the reader be interested in purchase. PC CHASSIS: InWin D-Frame Open Air Chassis  BENCHMARK SOFTWARE The software we will be using for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal Disk Info, Crystal Disk Mark, AS SSD, Anvil’s Storage Utilities, and PCMark Vantage. We prefer to test with easily accessible software that the consumer can obtain, and in many cases, we even provide links. Our selection of software allows each to build on the last and to provide validation to results already obtained. CRYSTAL DISK INFO VER. 6.1.14 Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, to the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device. Crystal Disk Info validates that this SSD provides us with a healthy outlook on SMART attributes, lets us know that TRIM is supported, as well as DevSleep. ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47 ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results. Many people discount ATTO Disk Benchmark simply because it tests with compressible data, that of which so many believe is an unfair way of determining SSD performance…and perhaps it can be. Testing in compressible data should never be totally discounted however, and looking at things within just may provide a different outlook than originally expected. Such may be the case when we see performance that does not graduate at a steady pace, as file sizes are increased. In this case, the Corsair Neutron XT displays excellent progression and tells us that this may be a very strong SSD. If we take a look at the low 4K transfer speeds as well, this also gives us an indicator of SSD quality as not all SATA 3 SSDs are capable of reaching 6Gbps speeds for both read and write data transfers. This drive, not only hits SATA 3, but has excellent SATA 3 results for both read and write; speeds then just climb from there. For a SATA 3 SSD, this is one of the best ATTO results we have seen to date. |
