Specifications, Availability and Pricing

Corsair is currently selling four solid state drives, the M64, S128, P128 and the drive that we are reviewing today, the P256. The P256 comes with a standard two year warranty and is the same size as a standard 2.5 inch notebook drive.

Corsair has chosen to use multilevel cell (MLC) NAND Flash Memory to keep the cost of the drive low. At the time of writing Newegg lists the Corsair P256 for 659.00 USD. This is quite a bit lower than the 256GB RunCore MLC Pro IV that we reviewed back in May and is even less than the Intel X25-M when comparing the cost per gigabyte of storage. The Intel drives are only available in capacities of up to 160GB so the Corsair P256 is in another class all together with its nearly 100GB of extra storage. The 128GB P128 is also listed at Newegg for 345.00, the same price as the Kingston SSDNow 80GB M-Series drive.

Performance wise Corsair is stating that the P128 and P256 are capable of read speeds of 220MB/s and write speeds of 200MB/s. That makes the Corsair Performance drives some of the fastest on the market, numbers that we hope to see in our review here today.