As mentioned to me in the comments under the Tech Tips video we did on the Corsair S128 SSD hard drive, the drive does NOT read at 150MB/s sustained and the reason for the WAY out of spec performance numbers is that the drive had not yet been fully formatted. That’s my mistake and when I did some follow up testing, it read at a normal ~90MB/s….. Or so I thought.

corsair-s128-benchmark1

Enter the X25-M, on which we have a Tech Tips coming out shortly. I was doing some testing with this drive, moving files from the Corsair SSD to a RAID-0 array with two X25-M 80GB drives, and I observed the transfer speeds you see above. They were verified using the good ‘ol fashioned “calculator + file size + stop watch” method and it looks the drive will actually read at about 120MB/s, but only if you’re doing more than one concurrent read. Transferring just one file (as you can see) will cap at 90MB/s. Still not the 150MB/s I originally reported, but it’s better than spec by a long shot…