Well for the PCIe slot repair I’ve hit a pretty big obstacle. I can’t seem to get a hot enough soldering iron at the local “DIY” stores, so I will have to try to go somewhere more specialized. If anyone has an idea where I could find a soldering iron that’s hot enough to work with lead-free solder on a PCB, please hit me with an email. It’s my name at NCIX.com (don’t want the spam screenscrapers grabbing my email addy from my blog)

Also, I’m very disappointed in Corsair. I’m currently in the middle of doing an upgrade on my girlfriend’s computer (she’s moving to i7 on account of I got my hands on a shipping damage eVGA X58 with a broken PCIe slot that I bent back into shape and wedged closed with a white eraser and some bent CPU socket pins that I bent back) and I decided to go SSD while I’m at it because for some reason she’s a stone cold hard drive killer. I remembered the briefing I got from Corsair on their S128 SSD and it seems to me it was all about “oem grade, high quality, high durability components”. I observed some “hitching”, something I hadn’t yet experienced having only used Intel X25-M drives and Corsair “S” series drives. Seems like the M64 mean “Jmicron 64GB drive” I did my best to replicate the IOmeter tests that Anand performed in his epic tale of SSD performance and I observed maximum latencies of up to one second when writing random 4k files over a 4GB section of the disk (100% random writes). It’s a little better than the two second latencies that he was observing, but with inconsistent test benches and methodologies it’s impossible to replicate the results exactly. Either way one second is FAR too high for an SSD.

I guess the most disappointing thing is that (I swear the bit about “uses high quality samsung controller” used to be right on the product page, but the Google cache doesn’t have it) Corsair made such a fuss about their drives using better quality controllers than the competition, so I bought one and here’s what I end up with.

After writing this I did some reading on the Corsair support forum. It looks like the “M” series drives are “not controller specific” and right now they are using a Jmicron controller. Fail.