Corsair Nova Series 2 2.5" 60GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) CSSD-V60GB2

Pros: These SSD's are going to be the future, no doubt about it. They are fast, use less power and are smaller. This one fits my HTPC's needs and helped when installing in to a small case.

Cons: A couple of things, first not all SSD's are created equal. Be advised there are 2 types, Asynchronous and Synchronous. This information is NOT provided on the packaging and with good reason. Asynchronous are lower performing SSD's. Testing has been done and prove that when an SSD with Asynchronous is 50% full of data, it will lose about 48-62% of their performance. Testing was done reading data from Windows Defender, Windows 7 Start up, Multimedia, Windows Photo Gallery, Gaming, Launching Adobe, copying compressed and uncompressed files, etc. In all cases, the fuller the SSD drive, the slower it was. Synchronous drives do not have this issue. As the drive gets full, it loses around 3-9% in the same tests. So consumers, be aware of this. Buy these products knowing this, I bring this up because most testing (and even by the manufacturer) are all done by installing Windows and then testing, but the "real" world we have pictures, videos, Excel sheets, Outlook, etc.

Overall Review: The consumer has to go to the website and have to dig deep for this information. ALL manufacturers are doing this, not making the information available. Again, buy these SSD's knowing this. When after 6 months of use it is really slow, you will now know why.

Pros: I was nervous about switching from platter drives over to SSD at fist. But wow, now I'm glad I did! This thing blows both my seagate sata3 500GB and hitachi sata3 1.5TB out of the water, and it's only sata2. Win7 loads about 3 times faster, even with the timeout during the loading screen. I'm seeing an average read speed of almost 210 MB/s, with peaks over 250 MB/s. Moved my WEI score for HDD read/write up from 5.9 to 7.1 Running this as my primary with a 1.5TB hitachi for backup, games, etc. Still have 43GBs open after all my apps and all those pesky 7 updates.

Cons: Wish it was sata3...oh and it doesn't do my laundry. Had a little bit of trouble getting Win7 to install, but that's my own fault. I've had this new motherboard for a long time now and haven't had the time to learn all the new BIOS features yet. Writes slow sometimes, kind of like a glorified flash drive. Slow to write, fast to read. Still tweaking it for more speed.

Overall Review: Before dishing out the big bucks for such a small drive I did as much research on SSDs as I could. A lot of posts I've seen are from people complaining about slow read/write speeds that "don't match the speed that the box says". Most of these posts come from people that list their builds, and they're running dinosaurs. That's more than likely the reason you're getting slow speeds. If you put one of these on an up to date sata2 or sata3 BUS, it will scream when compared to normal "click click.....dead" drives. That's the best thing of all about SSD, the durability. Big drives now days normally don't have a long life cycle because they're too fragile. Once the bigger ones come down in price, I'm never going to buy another platter drive again.....except for backup.

Pros: fast cheap amazing

Cons: only comes in 60GB variety, moar please 160GB would be sweet spot.

Overall Review: This was a test on a mac osx, which isn't known for its speedy use of SSDs. dmr:fastytest zel$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test.bin bJMeNewEgg=1m count=10000 10000+0 records in 10000+0 records out 10485760000 bytes transferred in 53.536488 secs (195861932 bytes/sec) That is writing for 195MB/s for 10GB .... nice. dmr:fastytest zel$ dd if=test.bin of=/dev/null bJMeNewEgg=1m 10000+0 records in 10000+0 records out 10485760000 bytes transferred in 34.451336 secs (304364395 bytes/sec) That is reading that same file for 304MB/s over 10GB .... wow, blown away. This thing trounces my Vertex2 by large margin. I doubt I will have another build in the next 3-6 months that doesn't use this thing. Pure awesome, Corsair hits a home run. I am going to try these as scratch disks in my Hadoop cluster. Amazing. I just got a major nerd crush on Corsair. BTW, OCZ, we just broked up.

Pros: Initially very, very fast as long as you have the correct settings in your BIOS and Windows (AHCI, etc)

Cons: *Performance degrades to the point it causes the system to hang repeatedly for seconds at a time. This is a well-documented problem in the Corsair forums and NewEgg reviews. The issue started rearing its ugly head less than a month after my OS install and finally got so bad I tossed an old 160gb Samsung back in. *Corsair support has no permanent solution for issues with this drive. The staff appear to ignore posts about this drive on the forum or dismissively suggest a secure erase or RMA. *No firmware update is available, unlike almost every other Corsair SSD.

Overall Review: Normally I don't bother writing reviews, but this drive was so terrible I don't want anyone else to consider it. I was looking for a low-cost SSD boot drive for my desktop... I should have gone with one of the bargain-basement Kingston drives instead. I'm sorry Corsair, but formatting a drive every couple months to restore performance is unacceptable.

Pros: it stores data and boots windows quickly if you do not install updates all it is good for is a secondary drive to install games to, not much faster than my dying 7,200 rpm drive though

Cons: updates and some programs take forever to install, if i try to play a game installed to the drive it is really choppy/laggy, trying to run multiple programs causes enormous slowdown sustained write speeds aren't much quicker than my 7,200 rpm hdd that is dying and over half the drive is slow (yellow sectors in the hd tune speed map)

Overall Review: do not buy this, im only using it because i cant return it i i would not sell this to anyone, i would be mad if this was given to me as a gift since it performs so badly while actually being used. never will i buy a corsair ssd again. i'll go with someone else. DOA isn't so bad as long as i can rma for a working one and be off. PURE TRASH, if it was cheaper i could understand. no returns and getting an exchange for the same product is pointless, i should've just bought the intel ssd or the other one that was $95 and came with a usb connector....

Pros: Perfect up to now, saw a big improvement login is and it is much faster than my 5400RPM drive. No problem installing Win7. no noise ...peace and quite.

Cons: None

Overall Review: The 60 gig is perfect as an OS drive and the regular software. Improved my laptop boot by much.

Pros: Cheap drives. Work well in RAID 0, and with a lot of tweaks. I used the SSD optimization guide on the ssdreview website to configure my hard drives. I also set all programs and windows temporary files to save to a secondary platter hard drive to reduce writes, and therefore wear and tear. They are still going strong after a year

Cons: Bad controller. No firmware updates (from Corsair at least...see below). Performance degrades significantly over time.

Overall Review: I have had these drives over a year in RAID 0 and they started to degrade over time. I started experiencing freezing, stuttering, and slow write speeds. One of the drives also started throwing errors. I looked all around the net for a Corsair firmware update, and I could not find one. However, I found a firmware update from another brand of drive with the same controller, and applied that firmware update to both of my drives. They are now working 100% better. The are very fast now, and there is no more freezing/stuttering. I found the firmware here: http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/mydigitalssd-msata-half-slim-and-2.5-inch-sata-ssd-firmware-update.html I wanted to post an updated review with the solution (the new firmware) just in case anyone else was having the same types of problems.

Pros: Easy to set up, didn't require new firmware or special steps

Cons: Very inconsistent performance with a fresh install of Windows 7 32-bit. I spent quite a while making sure everything was in order, and it seemed to be, but whenever the hard drive was doing multiple things at once, or at seemingly random intervals, the computer would lock up for a few moments before continuing at expected solid state speeds.

Overall Review: Corsair graciously accepted my RMA and is sending me another of the same model. However, I already own a Series 3 SSD that works marvelously and would prefer to just upgrade my order to one of those, but I am required to try another of the same model first. If my individual product was defective, I will update this review.