Corsair Accelerator 30GB & 60GB Review - PAGE 2

The Corsair Accelerator cache drive comes packaged in a small rectangular box displaying an image of the drive on the front along with the product name, storage capacity and SATA connection type. Overall the packaging is stylish and clean while at the same time being informative enough for the average consumer. It's also very similar to the packaging used for Corsair's other SSD lines like the Force series.

The reverse panel describes of the benefits of the Accelerator: "Using an Accelerator Series SSD cache drive can boost your system's read and write performance up to 5x over using a hard drive alone. Just add the drive to your system, download and install the intelligent caching software and start to enhoy faster boot times and quicker file access. There's no complicated drive mapping and no need to reinstall Windows." This paragraph is translated into six different languages, so it takes up the majority of the back of the packaging. The box has a small cutout that displays the SSD's internal bar code, a product sticker and FCC certification.

The SSD cache drive comes packaged within a plastic clam-shell casing for protection. The drive also includes a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter tucked behind it inside the box. The adapter comes with four screws to connect to the drive, allowing it to fit into any case that doesn't natively support 2.5" drives. It also comes with a quick install guide that gives a step-by-step overview of the installation process.

The Corsair Accelerator is encased in a plastic enclosure that is colored solid black. The product sticker is located on the front of the drive, and includes information like the model name, capacity and part number. The enclosure is a standard 2.5-inch design, but as mentioned earlier Corsair has included a 3.5-in adapter for desktop users. The back side of the SSD cache drive features strategically placed warranty stickers and a serial number that allows the NVELO software to be downloaded and installed.

With the enclosure removed, we can see that the Corsair Accelerator is built on a half slzed PCB that includes a total of eight Micron 25nm asynchronous MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash memory chips  (four on each side) that are manufactured by Toshiba. The difference between two models we are examing, besides the capacity, is the 30GB model uses the four channel SF-2141 processor instead of the the SF-2181 because it only uses four 8GB memory chips. The 45GB and 60GB models meanwhile use the SF-2181 processor, which supports up to 8 channels whereas SF-2141 is limited to 4 channels. All of three of the models use the SATA 3Gbp/s interface, giving them sequential read and write speeds of 270MB/s and 240MB/s respectively.