Corsair 30GB Accelerator: Cuts Price, Not Performance

Boot time is an easy place for an SSD to improve a system's responsiveness. We've subdivided boot time into two categories. The first -- boot-to-login -- is the amount of time it takes for the Windows Logon screen to display after the POST beep. The second, boot-to-desktop, is measured from POST beep to lag-free desktop and includes the boot-to-login measurement. There's a certain degree of subjectiveness to the latter, but not enough to impact the end result.


Boot times are an easy place for SSDs to show their moxie. The 30GB drive is ~10% slower than its 60GB counterpart. That makes it 'just' 3.08x as fast as the HD103SI alone rather than the 60GB's 3.36x advantage.

Application Load Times:
Next up is a straight performance comparison between various applications and games. Performance was measured with both the hard drive alone and again with the Accelerator drive installed. One of the potential downsides of an SSD cache drive is that data can be evicted, leaving you dependent on just the hard drive again if you run a program you haven't used in awhile.

This is easier with a 30GB drive than with a 60GB, but it's difficult to measure the difference without an objective metric. In both cases, moving tons of data around the drive can artificially cause cache evictions, but we never had a problem when performing real-world tasks.


Again, we see the 30GB drive trailing the 60GB in a few tests, but never by more than a couple of seconds. Performance is still substantially improved over the HDD alone. Nvelo's Dataplex software is pretty darn good at keeping your most heavily-accessed files on the SSD.