| Corsair Reactor R60 JMicron JMF612 SSD |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Storage | |
| Written by Austin Downing - Edited by Allison Downing and Olin Coles | |
| Wednesday, 30 June 2010 | |
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Page 11 of 11
Reactor Final ThoughtsThe Corsair Reactor R60 has the makings to be a very solid entry level drive for a very low price. Currently, some retailers are selling this drive for $104 with Mail-in-rebates, or $134 without. It still outperforms contemporary drives without breaking the bank, helping SSDs finally ease into the lower price segments of the market where they can keep dropping prices and increasing performance. This "solid entry level" SSD also has its share of problems. Many users complain of the drives not showing up in BIOS or disappearing after restarts and requiring multiple shutdowns to be seen again. Others users accuse the Corsair Reactor of silent data corruption; this includes myself. The first drive I received slowly corrupted data, eventually damaging my Windows partition beyond repair. What is worse is that this problem is difficult to diagnose due to its already mentioned silence. Even on CHKDSK or in the S.M.A.R.T. data, errors refuse to reveal themselves. The signs I received were programs not starting and requiring re-installation, BSoD's, Windows needing repair, and documents no longer opening or having massive errors in them. Corsair R60 ConclusionFor the price, the performance is good. It may not keep up with the likes of the SandForce controller, but even the cheapest of those drives starts at a price $70-80 above the Corsair Reactor R60. And yet this drive still outperforms the traditional storage in random reads and writes by a good amount with 4K reads in the 17MB/s range and writes in 15MB/s range. This drive has quite good sequential read speeds at 240MB/s, and its sequential write speeds at 108MB/s. This leaves things to be desired, but who can complain with that price? I find the appearance to be a moot point as this drive will be going inside your system hopefully never to see the light of day until it is replaced, but I really do enjoy the dark brushed aluminum look they gave this drive. It's not too flashy and would fit perfectly inside of a Corsair 800D case. With no moving parts that can be damaged by drops, the metals used to encase it can be thinner and therefore lighter. For those of us used to dealing with Traditional hard drives, they may feel flimsy, but in my time dealing with it, I found it to be very sturdy. If problems do arise, Corsair has quick and efficient customer service on both its website and forums that will take care of you and your drive throughout its 3 year warranty. If you prefer to deal directly with real people, you can even call their customer service (888-222-4346), and they will gladly help you resolve your problems. Functionality is as it should be: it provides extra performance in day-to-day life over traditional storage but is priced to fit in the mainstream market. The value of this drive at its current price of $134.00 ($104 after rebate for a limited time) makes this a great entry level drive, but its flaws with silent data corruption and not being able to be detected by the BIOS really hurts it. One of the positive things is that the Corsair kit includes a 2.5" to 3.5" conversion system so that it is easy to mount in your existing 3.5" drive bays without spending extra money. If Corsair releases new firmware that corrects the data corruption issues and helps with the data disappearance act this drive does, then it really could have an entry level winner on its hands, priced aggressively, and hopefully bringing Solid State Drives to the masses at last. Pros:
+ Inexpensive Price Cons:
- Data Corruption
- Lackluster Sequential Performance
- Low 4K Random IOPS Performance
Ratings:
Final Score: 7.0 out of 10Questions? Comments? Benchmark Reviews really wants your feedback. We invite you to leave your remarks in our Discussion Forum.
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Comments
On the Cons you mentioned low 4k speed, and I think for whoever wants to buy a SSD for OS, 4k read/write performance is the key to achieve better speeds.
At the value, you gave a 6.0, but in the conclusions it says it has a pretty good entry cost. Shouldn't the BIOS and performance issues affect directly on the performance and functionality scores? Or why did you put a 6 on value?
May I recommend you also test both the OCZ Vertex LE (Limited Edition) and the Vertex 2 ?
thanks
if it is not asking too much could you also test in parallel the Vertex LE (Limited Edition)?
This because there are many confusion around the web and although they seems to perform similar it would be nice for the customer to understand which one of these two is the fastest!
I trust Benchmarkreviews!!
thanks!
Also.... a hard drive that corrupts your data? How does that deserve a 7? Did you contact Corsair about that? What did they say?
The Corsair Reactor R60 SSD is definitely unable to work in a professional environment. I had one and only got problems with the non-detection by BIOS after reboot bug. After readings this article, i know that i had the data destruction, too. I didn´t recognized it, i always thought the errors i got were Windows or Software bugs. An ureliable hard drive is a piece of very expensive junk.
A rating of 0-1 would be adequate, until Corsair admits the bugs and fix them with a firmware update or callback of the defective drives.