Conclusion, Pricing, and Final Thoughts
Conclusion
PROS
- Outstanding design.
- Good overall performance.
CONS
- Cost is high even at its performance level.
Pricing and Warranty (street price at the time of this writing)
- 400GB – $320 ($0.80/GB)
- 800GB – $650 ($0.81/GB)
Warranty period is 5 years rated at 698 TBW for 400GB and 1,396 TBW for 800GB. $0.80 per GB is awfully high for any modern SSD, especially with competition like the 960 Pro, which at this writing ships a 512GB SSD for $280 ($0.55/GB). Despite the good looks, the NX500 pricing really does need to come down a fair bit to compete in the current SSD market.
Final Thoughts
As SSDs go, the Corsair NX500 is a thing of beauty. The Phison E7 controller offers good performance, and the industrial design is very well thought out, making the NX500 a likely default choice for those wanting to show off their SSD in a custom PC build. With great looks comes a greater price tag, so those who will only hide this SSD in a generic case hidden under a desk will likely be better off going with a lower cost solution, some of which offer even higher performance.
Dropping to gold on this one due to the high price:performance ratio, but man is it a looker!
This kills my Intel 750 400
This kills my Intel 750 400 GB in sequential, which matters not at all for my typical workloads. About the same or worse in random IOPS. Probably feels exactly the same in daily use. $320 price is not bad – Intel launched theirs at $400 and it’s still the same price today (luckily I got mine for $300 during a rare sale at Newegg).
I’d love to see a direct comparison review, but I’m sure these will sell better – cheaper and better looking. I’ll keep my Intel drive, because their reliability is legendary, and it just feels like it will last forever.
You can get 3 sm951 for a
You can get 3 sm951 for a little more…
as nice as those are, if I
as nice as those are, if I had that money to spend on storage then i’d rather just get more cheap sata ssd(s), like a 1TB samsung 850evo for about ~ $340.
Funny, at the conclusion page
Funny, at the conclusion page I remembered you were reviewing the Corsair NX500, I was much more interested in the details of the new testing method. Excellent work Allyn!
Request: Can we get more
Request: Can we get more reviews of gaming headsets?
gaming headsets are almost
gaming headsets are almost never good though. Just buy a hyperx cloud or sennheiser game zero/one
I had an old OCZ Z-Drive R4
I had an old OCZ Z-Drive R4 SSD with a bunch of unpopulated capacitor pads on the PCB too. Do you think they designed in some kind of power smoothing / filter stage or something and then figured the cost of adding tantalum caps to the BOM outweighed any noticeable benefit to the user?
Of course, that would be for
Of course, that would be for power loss protection on the enterprise version of the card, now that I read what Al wrote instead of just looking at the pretty pictures. That brings up another topic I find crazy, the UPS. Convert AC to DC to store it in a battery, then back to AC to feed it into the computer’s PSU, where it is converted again to DC to run all the circuits. Can’t make it any more better. Computers are solved, guys.
Yeah, it makes more sense to
Yeah, it makes more sense to just have a single version of the PCB, and add components as applicable for the enterprise version, etc.
Wow Allyn, that performance
Wow Allyn, that performance comparison history is legendary! Pulled out every SSD you could dig up in the office? You need to make that model list searchable so people can find this. A recent SSD review comparing sooooo many models is a rare find!
I kinda treat SSDs like
I kinda treat SSDs like Pokemon :). We definitely want to do better things with the data, but with this site design, we're limited to pics of charts.