Corsair 30GB Accelerator: Cuts Price, Not Performance
Conclusion
Performance Summary: Corsair's 30GB Cache Accelerator delivers almost all of the 60GB SSD's performance, but at a significantly lower price. In uncertain economic times, it's easier to justify a $55 dollar expense than an $85 upgrade, especially when a 3D movie for a family of 4 will set you back almost as much -- and that's just for the tickets. The 30GB Cache Accelerator is a great option for upgrading an older system, especially if you're trying to breathe new life into it for a year or two while saving up for something else. Even 4-5 year-old hardware can benefit enormously from an SSD, and Dataplex's software gives even the performance of a 5400 RPM HDD a huge kick in the rear.
Corsair 30GB Accelerator SSD
When we reviewed the 60GB version, some of you wrote in with concerns about reliability or other technical limitations on the product. Thus far, our experience continues to be excellent; Corsair provides a standard three-year warranty on all Cache Accelerators and the Nvelo software is quite good at what it does. If you think you might upgrade to a higher-capacity SSD at some point and would like to repurpose the Cache Accelerator as a stand-alone drive, we'd go for the 60GB version. 60GB isn't much storage space, but it's enough for an OS, small collection of games, some multimedia content, or a suite of business apps. The 30GB is technically big enough for a system, but a fully patched and updated version of Windows 7 weighs in at some 16GB. That leaves virtually no room for anything else, especially since SSD performance tends to drop dramatically as the drive approaches full.
Depending on your needs, either SSD can be a good option. The performance increase is absolutely worth the cost.
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