Corsair Performance 3 Series 128GB SSD Review in RAID 0

Corsair Performance 3 Series – Marvell Inside

Four screws hold two two aluminum case sections in place and reveal the diminutive 1.8″ PCB inside which is a little unusual but gives Corsair some flexibility in maybe offering smaller drives.

On one side rests four of the eight NAND modules which are each 16GB in density for 128 GB total on board.

The Toshiba 34nm NAND is the same we saw recently on the Plextor M2 Series drive.

On the flip side, in addition to the NAND, we find the controller partnered with a cache chip.

The cache is a Hynix DDR3-1333 SDRAM with a 128 MB capacity. This is relatively large and should be more than ample to buffer the data which to keep drive performance smooth and consistent.

This version of the Marvell 88SS9174 controller is also found on the Plextor M2 drives and on the new Intel 510 drives. It supports TRIM, garbage collection and the fast SATA 6Gbps interface. Intel uses a custom firmware which we saw really impacted performance. Corsair told us their firmware is custom as well and we’ll see how it bears out in the benchmarks.