Specifications, Pricing and Availability

We've already written about the Corsair Performance 3 128GB drive and looked at its single drive performance. With that being the case, we are only going to briefly look over the specifications.

The Performance 3 is available in three capacity sizes; 64GB, 128GB and 256GB. Since the P3 uses a Marvell controller that has scaling performance based on capacity, the 128GB drive is rated lower than the 256GB drive. The 256GB model's performance is rated at 480MB/s read and 320MB/s write. In turn the 128GB is rated at 410MB/s read and 210MB/s write.

Those numbers are for single drive performance; today we are here to look at dual 128GB RAID performance. Over the years we've seen RAID arrays treat SSDs very well with nearly a doubling of performance and we've also seen very little performance increase from using two drives together. Since I already ran the tests, I can say that using two Performance 3 drives in RAID 0 works out pretty well.

In the case of the Performance 3, running two drives in a single array also has a cost benefit. The Corsair Performance 3 256GB drive has a current cost of