At a first glance, Corsair’s latest SSD the Performance Pro may not seem anything exceptional with read/write figures similar to SandForce 2 based SSDs, but what makes it stand out is its ability to deliver its performance regardless of compressibility of the data. According to Corsair’s blog, its built-in advanced background garbed collection allows it to consistently perform even without the help of TRIM, such as in a RAID configuration.
SandForce 1 & 2 based SSDs achieve their high performance based on the assumption that most data can be easily compressed. This is indeed true for average use such as storing the OS, software, documents and databases, which all consist of easily compressible data. However, when it comes to video, audio and photos such as use in video production, a music studio or photography, this data cannot be compressed any further (at least not without resorting to lossy-compression), meaning that SSDs using the SandForce processor run in their worst case scenario in such environments.
This is not the case for the Corsair Pro, which uses a Marvel 88S-9174 6Gbps chipset that doesn’t rely on data compression to achieve its performance. With sustained read/write ratings of 515MB/s and 440MB/s respectively and up to 65,000 Random 4K IOPS, this looks to be one seriously fast SATA3 SSD that will not slow down when faced with incompressible data.
So how does it perform? Well check out the review at The SSD Review! It’s worth noting that the PC Vantage results in this review are also more realistic than the results obtained on SSDs affected by data compressibility (e.g. SandForce based SSDs). For example, have a look at the PC vantage results for any SandForce SSD and compare the throughputs against the AS SSD sequential write result in the same review.
In theory, the throughputs for picture, video and music content should not be higher than the AS SSD sequential write result as this type of data is incompressible and AS SSD uses incompressible data for its testing. However, in the cases I’ve seen, the PC Vantage results showed much higher throughputs on SandForce based SSDs, indicating that it is using 00-filled or FF-filled dummy audio, video and picture files for its tests. It would be interesting to see how the PC Vantage scores would have been affected in those reviews had it actually used incompressible data in its tests.