Corsair Accelerator 30GB & 60GB Review - PAGE 1

The Corsair Accelerator is a lineup of dedicated SSD cache drives designed to be a hassle-free upgrade to an existing system and according to Corsair, offers an up to fivefold performance increase over systems using mechanical HDDs alone. To achieve this, Corsair includes intelligent caching software developed by NVELO. Intelligent caching means it automatically learns which files and programs you access the most, so the program can optimize the system performance by caching these to the Accelerator SSD.

In total there are three models in the Accelerator series with storage capacities ranging from 30GB up to 60GB. Neoseeker was sent the largest capacity model for review, which currently has an MSRP of $89. At this price, the 60GB Accelerator costs roughly the same as a kit of high-performance memory so if it can really improve performance by the advertised factor of five, it could be a worthwhile upgrade to any PC.

The Accelerator series drives are built around the SandForce SF-2181 processor and the SATA 3Gbp/s interface. This is obviously a cost saving measure, but this is a market where a lower cost unit will sell more volume. Since the drives use the SATA III interface, the speeds will be under 300MB/s, but with sequential read and write speeds of 270MB/s and 240MB/s the drive is still blazing fast in comparison to a standard HDD.