Corsair Accelerator Series CSSD-C60GB 2.5" 60GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Pros: + Wicked fast, even on SATA 3GB/s ports
+ SUPER easy to configure
+ Very reliable, I installed these into 3 computers in my office. We use our systems from 8am until 5pm every day. Every one has been rock solid. I installed a 30GB version into my wife's computer at her work which gets used all day, every work day and for a year now hers has also been rock solid.

Cons: - Ridiculously long activation code in difficult to read font face of a minuscule font size. I photocopied the drive at like 200% zoom just so I could read it. I keep the photocopy in the motherboard box with the documentation because it's required to download and activate updates to the Dataplex software.

Other Thoughts: Motherboard is: MSI X58M (SATA 3.0GB/s)
Boot drive is: Western Digital WD Black (WD6402AAEX) 640GB - 7200 RPM - 64MB Cache - SATA 6.0Gb/s

Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.1 X64 4 pass benchmark results:

HDD solo -
Seq...........Read [MB/s] 54.33 - Write [MB/s] 89.02
512K.........Read [MB/s] 36.54 - Write [MB/s] 52.57
4K.............Read [MB/s] 0.434 - Write [MB/s] 0.911
4K QD32...Read [MB/s] 0.647 - Write [MB/s] 0.818

HDD +SSD -
Seq...........Read [MB/s] 155.1 - Write [MB/s] 64.33
512K.........Read [MB/s] 159.5 - Write [MB/s] 62.97
4K.............Read [MB/s] 18.50 - Write [MB/s] 53.57
4K QD32...Read [MB/s] 19.93 - Write [MB/s] 51.26

Pros: I have been using the cache for about 3 months and it keeps getting faster. I have benched the drive and over time my system has gotten faster. it learns which programs you use the most and places them in the cache drive. A lot of the new ultra books are using a cache drive.

Cons: None, just read the instructions.

Pros: No pros, it doesn't work

Cons: The product did not work on an average setup.
None of the described 'limitations' are an issue in my setup, yet it doesn't work, it simply crashed my system.
Do not bother, do not waste your money.
Buy a regular SSD (128/256gb) and do the windows install on it, you will thank me. Knowing what I know now, I would have gone with that setup.

Other Thoughts: This product is immature and should have never been released.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Uvaman,

We're sorry that you're having troubles with this product. Please contact our Customer Service Department at 888-222-4346 and we'll work on improving your experience with Corsair.

Thank you,
Corsair Customer Support

Pros: May be used as a "cache" drive for your main Windows boot drive by downloading free software.

Cons: Not universally compatible as a cache drive.

Other Thoughts: Having read many complaints in the user reviews for this SSD, I went to Corsair's website and checked the Release Notes and Exclusions notes for the free downloadable "Cache" software. The Release Notes CLEARLY explain the limitations of how it can be used. One can only wonder why users who complain did NOT read and take note of the correct way to use the cache drive feature !

Pros: Speeds up your PC before it kills it softly (3 days).

Cons: This is my first review for any tech product as I usually don't bother with writing reviews. But I hope this will make the next person thinking about this drive to think twice.

Dataplex software is untested and will corrupt yoru main harddisk. It caches windows filesystem files + boot files and any configuration changes to your PC such as installing windows SP or update will make the drive not bootable.

I paired this device with 1 TB western digital and after 3 days I noticed my PC is not booting due to some error message from dataplex in the POST screen. After 8 hours I rebuild the PC from scratch and this time I installed the dataplex software after windows installation completed. It was fine until I installed the new AMD drovers for my graphic cards and

Other Thoughts: Dataplex software is not safe proof against improper PC crashes, power surge of PC, or any kind of sleep/hibernate. Any SSD packaged with This software (Corsair/OCZ) needs to be recalled until it goes through more testing with different PC configurations. Re-installing AMD graphic driver or System crash in worst case scenario shouldn't cause windows boot file corruption or the cache drive algorithms should be re-designed not to cache system files.

Note: During the time I had the system running with this cache drive I noticed that my applications files go missing. For example my Microsoft Office stopped working due to missing files. The program couldn't be uninstalled due to missing files and I had to install another version of Microsoft office to be able to use Office programs. Another example is that system restore or windows back up will stop working after you install dataplex software.

Pros: None

Cons: As soon as I installed this on my Win7-64bit system, it corrupted the main hard drive as well as the partition table on a 2TB data drive of photos. The system became unbootable, files became more and more corrupted, and finally the system would no longer boot. This product is complete and utter garbage.

Other Thoughts: I can't believe newegg would sell something like this. Plus, you can't go to newegg for support, refund, or anything, because they just defer you to the manufacturer.

Pros: This technology and software solution does provide a nice boost to startup speed and the launching of commonly used programs.

Cons: If for some reason your OS installation fails and you need to recover your files, buy some good software. Most of the files you use will be cached and unrecoverable. Pictures, documents and even the entire directories you most often visit will be currupted. Be warned. Just buy the SSD big enough to make you happy. Corsair makes great products but this one can cost you dearly.

Other Thoughts: All is not lost. There is some softwares out there that can help you. I used Z.A.R. recovery. It was $59.99 if i remember correctly.

Pros: - Setup is very easy. Plug in the drive, download and run the software, and you're done
- Cost is relatively low
- Noticeable perfomance increase (reduced boot times, etc.)

Cons: Software isn't totally reliable. I had to unistall the software and reinstall after a just a few weeks of use. Apparently the caching software doesn't like certain programs, like some antivirus programs, and some backup utilities. If it has a problem, you'll have to unistall and reinstall the software.

Other Thoughts: Make sure you keep the Dataplex software key handy. It's printed on the drive itself and nowhere else. Having a P67 board I was kinda envious of the Z68 boards , hardware-based SSD caching capabilites. Not wanting to buy a new board quite yet, I decided to give this a shot. It's a great idea in theory, and it does work as advertised when it's running correctly, but running into these issues after only a month of use does give me pause. Hoprfully future versions of the Dataplex software will improve reliability and compatability.

Pros: none, except the programmers of the Dataplex software at Nvelo did seem to try really hard (for 3 months) to get a version that would work with Nvidea 6xx chipsets (specifically the SATA controller), before giving up and sending me a gift card for my troubles, otherwise i'd give it zero Eggs

Cons: multiple BSOD's on first few installs that always failed, when a new version of Dataplex did install successfully it only worked fo a short time before CHKDSK decided to check for Drive Consistancy, which completely borked my system, requiring a clean install; i'd make sure you have your rig backed up before using Dataplex, no matter what chipset/mobo you use

Other Thoughts: seemed like a good idea to breathe some extra life into my aging system (E6750 Core2Duo, Evga 680i mobo, 4gb ram, Asus gtx460) but was way more trouble than it was worth

Pros: SSD works as a regular drive.
The drive is fast.
Can be used as a ReadyBoost drive.

Cons: The bundled software is dangerous: corrupts file system.
Drive too large for single-partition ReadyBoost (but can be used whole if split in 2 partitions)

Other Thoughts: After recovering from the file system corruption (I had to fully re-image the HDD from backup), I've formated the SSD as plain old NTFS drive.
After adding a new drive letter, Windows 7 promptly popped up a dialog asking if I want to use it as a ReadyBoost device..
I agreed :-)
Well, long story short - MS done everything that Corsair should've done in their software:
1. Performance improvement similar to Dataplex (when it was working).
2. Improves performance of ALL drives, not just the boot.
3. Rock solid (by design - hard to corrupt FS data).
4. Nice reporting (through perfmon) of cache activity.

Of course, you can probably use ANY SSD drive and get the performance gain (no advantage of Corsair)...

Also note - ReadyBoost allows to use only 32GB on a single drive letter (ant it has to be a drive letter). For a larger device like this SSD you need to create multiple partitions (each under 32GB) and treat them as separate ReadyBoost devices (up to 8).