The Tech Report has a detailed review of Corsair's latest solid state drives, the Neutron and Neutron GTX. Corsair sources its SSD controllers from a wide variety of manufacturers and has SSDs for all occasions: the Force series for powerhouse rigs, the Performance series for workstations and RAID, the budget Nova series, and even Accelerator drives for use as cache. The new Neutron drives are positioned as performance drives for a broad range of applications, from work to play, occupying a similar spot to the famously red-bodied Force drives.
The Force disks use controller chips from SandForce. But the Neutron drives are sporting the new LM87800 controller, from Link_A_Media Devices. Where SandForce spends a lot of silicon on compression and deduplication in order to minimize write amplification and extend the life of its NAND flash chips, the Link_A_Media controller relies on "eBoost." This is what Tech Report calls a mixture of "error correction and adaptive signal estimation techniques." As we discussed in great detail in our feature series on the inner workings of SSDs, each time a NAND flash cell is written to and then erased for rewriting, the cell retains a bit of excess electrical charge. As they age and go through more cycles, the extra charge makes the flash cells progressively more and more difficult to reliably write to and read from. All the different controller manufacturers have their own tricks for extending cell life, and Link_A_Media uses an entire core of its dual-core controller chip just to handle the flash. That way, the company uses its eBoost bag of tricks to more accurately judge the cells' voltage levels so that their contents can be read.
From a performance perspective, the Neutron drives look great, benching out roughly equal to their SandForce-powered counterparts. However, they still come in at a higher cost per gigabyte at today's pricing, with the lower-end Neutron hitting $0.83 per gigabyte for 240 usable GB of space and the Neutron GTX coming in at $1.04 at the same capacity (the Force GT weighs in at $0.79). Still, SandForce-powered disks like the Force series take a performance hit when writing incompressible data, and Tech Report's benchmarks bear this out. That extra cost might be worth paying in order to get more consistent write performance.
For now, Link_A_Media's controllers will only be found in Corsair-branded drives. The exclusivity agreement was announced in early June, prior to Link_A_Media's acquisition by semiconductor manufacturer Hynix. In the face of the acquisition, it's unclear how long that agreement will last.
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